


Solace

by Lavender_Seaglass



Series: What's heard in the silence [1]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Blood Magic, Body Dysmoprhia, Depression, Elvhen Pantheon, F/M, More characters to come, Mythal's revenge will shake the very heavens, Old Gods (Dragon Age), Post-Trespasser, Tevinter, The Forbidden Ones, The Forgotten Ones - Freeform, The Void, Why Did I Write This?, custom names, go for the artefact, lore compliant speculation sort of, speculation about DA4's PC, warnings for mentions of slavery and everything else that Tevinter does, what did elves want with the titans though
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-02-09 19:23:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12895026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Seaglass/pseuds/Lavender_Seaglass
Summary: With time running short, the members and allies of the once-Inquisition are called towards Tevinter. They have all vowed to stop him; she has vowed to save him.And, though she didn't know it at the time, she really did mean it. No matter what it might have meant for her.(iv. - After gathering some crucial information, she learns something about Abelas. He is not someone she would have thought to have any stock in fated things.)





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to a dear friend of mine who recently passed away too suddenly. I'll always have less in my life without you. 
> 
> For the story itself, I'm not even really sure where to begin. It's built off of some of the ideas I played around with in the other work in this series. I definitely don't want to give away too much, but I will say this. The meetings and drama will start soon, right after spending some time in the Inquisitor's life, such as it is. I didn't mean for it to end up so long of a look but, as I wrote it, it ended up being the length it needed to be. It establishes what's been happening with her end since the end of Trespasser.
> 
> Otherwise I probably won't comment much on what's happening until the end. So I want to thank everyone now who's helped me with this, and who may read it. I would also like to say that all feedback is very valued and appreciated.

Come dawn, she rises, relieved, for finally she is able to move, to step about her own room without guile. No-one can complain, no-one can wonder, and no-one else can worry, if they hear the noises of stirring coming from behind the heavy, stout wooden door. Her unrest, and the depths of the deficit she has been deepening night upon night, is, to the best of her ability, keep private for one more morning. 

Patience is not the problem. She could stare out the generous bay window at the clean and clear Fereldan night, painted with void violet and luminous indigo where the stars cascade in fluid clouds across a galaxy’s horizon, she could look at the sky for hours. Or, she could look at her ceiling—darkened and shadowed, lacking even an empty spider web to disturb, and for all that it’s recently really registered to her as a vista, it may as well not be existing.

But the view doesn’t make much of a difference to her now; her attention isn’t too demanding of details for something to keep it. Even a wall could do. In fact she spends her time watching the one to her left emerge presently from the indeterminate dusk. With the odd imbalance of a morning’s chiaroscuro, the window is the first thing defined along its dark stretch. It’s faintly grey first, it’s faintly coloured next, and then, compared to the black and grey that frame it, the whole breadth of its panes becomes a bright, fiery convex looking glass lit up by a world that’s she’s supposed to believe is real. 

That’s what they are all supposed to believe. That’s what the Chantry calls it. That’s what other mages call it. That's what everyone calls it—the real world. As opposed to unreal, supposedly. That’s what the Fade is called. It doesn’t matter that the Fade is where most of them will spend nearly a third of their lifetimes whether they want to or not. 

By now, she can see enough red in the sky above the lightening purple mountains to know that she should actually be up. Too much longer and she’ll be dawdling. So she gets out of bed. Blankets moved, sheets pushed aside, the tips of her toes touch the floor first. Not too cold, so her heels and her soles follow, taking steps over the wood floor and cozy rugs in turn. These floorboards are not the originals, and, what’s been laid for carpeting, was picked to appeal to the perceived sensibilities of a foreigner born in a place where snow can only be found on the ground at higher, more difficult altitudes. Anything antique had been removed and preserved when this place first came into possession of the Inquisition.

Now, it is the property of the Chantry, specifically of the Divine Victoria. She has leased it out to one Cullen Stanton Rutherford, the first man without an ennoblement to hold such a vast estate in a long time, even on a temporary basis, and even in Ferelden. 

She knows he doesn’t care, has heard him say it’s not an accomplishment and anyway it’s not something he’s concerned about. After all, as they all know, he’s just here to continue to do good work as a citizen who’s now retired to private life. It is his choice, his proud choice, to keep helping people. He will help both the templars and the mages who need it. 

Still, she thinks it’s nice. For him. He keeps achieving things. And his hard, earnest work is being rewarded. Why is it that such a logical cause-and-effect pair seems to be so scarce in this world? 

There could be a lot of reasons, she observes to herself, as she wrestles her shift over her head. For several seconds she simply stands there. Naked, she watches the useless thing float to the floor and pool at her feet, which then step on the crude lace linings. Having packed or sold or given away most of her nicer things, what she’s left with are these accoutrements of a lesser lifestyle. Not that she minds. It just sometimes they are gaudy, and sometimes they are uncomfortable. Sometimes, they chafe at her neck and her wrist and make her wish, with a brief, vague, already dissolving thought, that maybe she should pay more attention to what needs to go into the laundry. She’d only had to put up with this shift because all the others ones she has are currently pungent, unattractive even to her. 

So. She should think about taking more care of herself.

Or something like that. Make some kind of improvement. 

The white fabric is soft against her feet, however. It slinks between her toes and the varnished, treated wood. As she gets into her undergarments, it’s a nice sensation beneath her. 

Which is nice to have before she has to do the hard part. 

She stares at it—the cold, dead thing that is what other people call her limb. They refer to it as her arm. Her hand. As if it were actually a real part of her. As always, Dagna’s work has produced a masterpiece: finely crafted ironbark, the last bit of a large amount gifted to the Inquisition by a surprisingly kind Dalish emissary before he vanished, serves as a base that shines even in the most desultory of glooms, with lovingly worked, deceptively delicate extensions which are fully articulate as fingers when animated by magic. The flawless quality of their attunement means that a mage only has to use a very minimal, and very meagre, amount of her mana to manage things as efficiently as if she were not maimed and handicapped. In the centre of what is considered the palm is a slot for one of several runes crafted with the potential of her particular needs in mind. One of them is a rune of sealing which keeps the whole extension constantly containing within it the heat generated and shared by the other, living parts of her body; one of the runes is designed to function like a torch. It emits a light, yellow and cheerful, like the sun. Only held in her hand, to show her the way, the young, enthusiastic dwarf had said when she personally presented all of it to the former Inquisitor. That was the last time she saw the dwarf. It will probably always be the last time, too.

She stares at the prosthetic.

And, eventually, she puts it on because she needs two hands to get herself dressed if she’s not going to be asking for help. Which she won’t be. The first few times she had were too hard to bear. Even now the memories rankle without needing to be completely recalled—skimming them brings about frustration, and bitterness directed towards herself and her failures, and recalls the visceral, belittling fear that this would be her life now. That this is what she had been spared for. This was it. 

Once her tights and jerkin are on, she secures around her waist a sash of cloth that adds a swath of colour to the otherwise drab black, brown, and white ensemble. A belt might give her a better cinch, but this has fewer clasps and catches. It is also, in her estimation, more reminiscent of something feminine, which is how she has tended to prefer styling herself when given the chance. Her hair—which, bangs and all, has lately grown longer and longer with no-one to insist she do anything with it—she keeps simple. After brushing out the night’s tangles with a few quick strokes, she ties it up, secures it, and flips it. An inverted bun keeps it up off her neck, and it’s elegant enough to make it seem like she’s attempted more effort than she has. For just the extra seconds it takes to tuck and twist the wad of white she won’t have to worry for the rest of the day about the weight of it slipping and causing the whole thing to unravel.  

To her cheek she touches the silver-white fingers of the hand which is tinted slightly blue. The construct and the light thrum of her magic are warm against her skin. Looking out the window, she catches up the loose tendrils of her hair and pins them into place tightly behind the rounded shells of her ears. 

By now the sky is dusted with rose and blushing burgundy. A bell bursts out and sounds over the horizon—five times, five echoing tolls it makes, to mark the first service of the day. 

While everyone else on the estate is headed towards the chapel to crowd into pews and bow their heads and raise their voices in worship, she finds her way outside. Dew on everything twinkles with the piercing shards of the sun, that first light finally breaking over the encircling mountains and making it down into the lower parts of the land carved away by the violence of heavy ice committed over the course of deep time. Light increases, and grows, and the shadows that have recently been birthed around things are already beginning to shorten. They will contract until it is midday.

Mist that has pooled burns off, the lingering chill retreating to cracks and crevices is dispersed and vanquished. The ground is firm and familiar under her feet as she makes her way to the barn and her favourite part of the day. Her task is to water and feed the chickens and collect any eggs from the hens. A chore, though she doesn’t consider it such. 

She has no qualms with spreading out their feed and having them follow after her in a fluttering, fussy flock. She is glad to pick up their smooth, perfect eggs no matter how much gunk or grime or shit may be on them. Once they are clean, she admires the different shapes and sizes in her basket—from the utterly unblemished to the direly speckled, from the tenderest of blues, to the richest orange-brown, to the rare few velvet black ones laid by the Orlesian hen gifted to her by a poor farmer for saving his children from wraiths, each one is of interest to her. They are beautiful. They are natural. They are a sight like gems.

In Ostwick, she was never allowed to so much as consider taking on duties pertaining to any aspect of tending livestock. Though she had no further claim to it, and was supposedly separated from both its benefits and its burdens, her noble name would go on to imprison her. Menial tasks, which would have allowed her the freedom of some fresh air, were considered below what she was fit for. The outdoors were denied to her because of it. She was rendered softer than other fragile mages because of it.

Now, after she has actually been someone, such a view is nonsense. It’s the kind of favouritism and stratifying, stifling privileges that Cullen balks against like a cat shown water he could possibly be bathed in. 

That’s something she likes about him. That, after everything she’s survived, there’s someone who agrees with her: her past, or at least the parts of it that she can’t change no matter how responsible she is, shouldn’t change any of her present circumstances. The only thing that matters now is what she does. That’s how she’s going to earn her keep and retain her place among those who want to be here. She has a real reason to get out of bed. 

Though the hens squawk and clatter about and ruffle each other feathers over trifles that don’t concern her, she doesn’t mind them, and there’s really no way they could actually bother her enough to make her think of this task as worse than an inconvenience. What they want from her, she can easily give them. They are actually capable of being satisfied by the paltry attention she shows them, and they prefer that she doesn’t try to reach out and touch them in some way. It’s simple—they just want food, and she just wants to feel like she’s accomplished something. Then she can stare in whatever direction she wishes while the gathered eggs sit in the woven basket hanging off her bent elbow as whichever hens are currently squabbling peck at one another around her boot-clad feet.

Today, she looks towards the mountains, where, overnight, the first streaks of snow have appeared. Winter will be here soon. 

Before that, autumn, along with the parade of things that she knows come with this time of year in Ferelden: scarves, then coats, then thicker cottons and wools, gloves in the morning, layers laid on top of one another in a certain order, she’s learnt that it’s wool first, to be against the skin to make the best use of its thicker weave. Bonfires, winds coming up from the south like the exhalations of a giant, frozen, sorrowful being spreading its mourning across the world. Scattered rain, snows that melt, and then snows that don’t. For months. Once the first leaves start to colour towards their magnificent dying shades, it seems to her a short, inexorable plunge into a white, icy wasteland that only the forsaken must venture out of doors into. The chickens won’t mind if it’s another hand that dispenses their food and lays claim to what few eggs they might produce, but she will continue to do this, she thinks, come the veiling of the world. Maybe this time, her fourth time trying, will be the time that she finally doesn’t mind a Fereldan winter too much.

Maybe, given the circumstances of the current world and her place within it, she just won’t care all that much.

A bell tolls. And so knells the conclusion of the peaceful part of her morning. Breakfast is soon, is really just about to start, and it’s the one meal from which her absence would be noted, as she knows from previous experience, from the handful of times she had to excuse herself with something mildly concerning to quell worries and suspicions of something worse. Like when she didn’t quite lie about having excessively high levels of fatigue for morning, or when she mimicked the husky croak of a cold. She had managed to get most of a day to herself. That was a waste of time—people who were depending on her had suffered that day from a lack of care she didn’t actually mind, or regret, giving. It’s important work that they do here. She helps people. 

On the edge of the forest, where the trees start to cluster together and truly obscure the sun from the lower lying things, a pair of deer are grazing. They are oblivious to her. A fly lands on her cheek and she swats at it with her hand that is both lighter and stronger than steel. 

Giving a brittle shiver, for she really does feel devoid of heat, she gathers herself and decides to head back over to the main hall. It will be breakfast, and then time for her first session of the day. The templar she’s helping heal is on the verge of committing to going off of lyrium completely. 

Once, when Cullen was vulnerable, but maybe not at his weakest or most shameful, he told her what the hardest part was. It was knowing that he could do better than what he was allowing himself to do.

She told him, at least he was trying. She asked him, is this what he wanted?

Yes, he had said, with tepid sweat sliding down his swollen temples and crowding around the grooves of his quivering grimace. Even if he hated that it wasn’t what he could have conscientiously called giving their cause his best. 

But it’s what he wanted. That was something.

Wasn’t it?

 

**.**

 

Although she isn’t fond of having to touch people, and especially templars at that, she can’t exactly complain about this contact. Hands on her patient—this is a required part of the work she does now. As a conduit of healing, she has to channel her magic somehow, and it’s physical contact that works the best. She’s been taught this lesson more than once her in life. 

Intimacy can be an aid to accomplishing an intended task with magic. After all, the closer you are, the less energy has to be wasted on transfer and transference. That just seems logical. It usually proves to be so, too.

Lightly, she squeezes the man’s shoulder, and leans forward to meet his gaze. She means to engage him after indicating that she’s going to check up on him. The spirit which is invisible to him lingers nearby, close, in the Fade. Hovering, concerned, invested in this man’s welfare as any other compassionate person would be.

He is looking rather sallow. And he seems thin, diminished—not just gaunter, but lesser as a whole. Talking with him she has had the impression more than once that he is still not quite used to no longer having abilities that set him apart, and above, and make him more capable than others. If he can actually handle being without so much power, is yet to be seen. 

Currently, he certainly is very powerless. He quails under even the gentlest of her touches. Her gaze seems to be a burden upon him. 

“How are you feeling?” she asks in a slow, deliberately comforting voice. 

“Awful.”

“Well, you’re alive to feel awful at least.”

“I don’t know if I can do this.” 

It’s not an admission. It’s a frank statement of what he thinks is a fact. He doesn’t even bother to brush off her hand, to dismiss the efforts she is making on his behalf. 

She is not sure how to respond to such candidness. He isn’t appealing to her for her help. He’s just telling her he doesn’t think he is capable of enduring what he’s set out to do with the aid of those whom he sought to mentor and guide him with their burgeoning body of experience on the matter. Stories of the addictions they’d broken had inspired him to make the sojourn all the way from Wycome. 

Once more, she presses her fingers into the taut, tangled muscles of his shoulder. “No-one can make you do this. Not even you. But I think you should wait before deciding you’ve lost. One loss doesn’t mean you’ve been defeated.”

He considers her through the fringe of his mussed, swampy hair. It’s still messed up from the frantic scrapping of his trembling hands across his scalp as he had recounted to her his nightmares fresh from the night before. Lips move, and he swallows, but no words emerge from him. 

Then he looks away from her—he looks away from the former Inquisitor. The templar looks away from the mage, the jailor looks away from the freed prisoner. He must resent her when he is still so trapped, so haunted, so immured and with no easy solution to the languishing. 

It’s hard for her. Not nearly as it is for him, but there’s a pinching at the base of her skull that niggles her with its insistent, repetitive reminder. Here is a man, before her, suffering the consequences of his actions. What would he have her do? Release him from his misery, absolve him of his deserved punishment? Reminding him his suffering has a cause is not kind to him, but nor is it kind to anyone to go around excusing everything. Then no-one ever learns and nothing ever changes. 

And she wants things to change. She really, truly does. That’s why she worked so hard to set a good example, when it was hard to live with just the collateral damage of her own world-contorting decisions.  Remembering this, she exhales her held, troubled breath in the face of his determination of failure.

Again, she puts pressure upon him. “Take it one day at a time. It’s the best anyone can do. It’s what I did.”

That, out of everything, seems to finally breach through his resolve to write himself off as a lost cause. After all, if a weak-willed, easily tempted mage can win over her unfathomably evil enemies with such a simple strategy, imagine what a templar, who actually is used to being in control, could do with it. Finally, there is some depth evident in his eyes. 

“You’re right. I won’t give up now. Not yet.”

“So, are you ready for another go at it?”

“How much longer?” 

She imagines there’s a fold forming already in his resolve from his reactive flinching. And she does’t hold it against him. It has been a tough day. “Just one more today. Tomorrow, if you’re really going to keep your act clean, we can work on repairing some of the damage that’s been done.”

“Is there really that much of it?”

Forcing her face into forms, shapes, and lines that she knows have served to reassure others who have looked to her for such things, Althea gives him a tired, loop-sided smile. “Not more than I can repair, in any case.”

He reaches out to her, and he holds her arm as she and the spirit heal him. Both of his hands are gripping into her real, pliant flesh. At the very height of the process of purifying his body, he twists from the thousands and thousands of pinpricks of agony, and the bones of her forearm are wrenched and ground together. 

In the afterglow of his pain she soothes him the best she can with much more measured procedures. She uses just her mana and a touch of the spirit’s sympathetic guidance. When she is done, he is lulled and sleeping and unaware of how blackly her bruises are threatening to bloom. 

Exhausted, enervated, she thanks the spirit with a nod of her head and bids it goodbye for now before it willingly, and gratefully, returns to the Fade to renew itself. For Althea, there’s lunch to attend, with food to consume to replenish her energy. 

She does not go to the dining hall. Quietly, she retreats from the patient’s room, and moves without sound down familiar hallways filled with the noon’s brilliant late summer light. She arrives at a wood-panelled room that serves as her office, and, inside it, she finds the one she shares it with. He’s sitting down surprisingly absorbed in something. It looks suspiciously like he’s studying it. 

He’s always said he isn’t much for being a scholar. Evangeline says so too, despite however many robes he may still wear. This was a joke, apparently, between them. He had laughed when she said it and then they had touched one another in a way that embarrassed Althea to witness. She had rarely felt like such an isolated, lonely voyeur. As far as what she’s ever seen of the two, Rhys is the only person who’s so much as considered glancing contact with Evangeline. She’s the sort of person you know you shouldn’t touch unless she wants you to.

The woman is sitting on the other side of his desk, one elbow placed on the crowded surface, her palm supporting her brow and her fingers eloquently curved to her temples as she reads something she’s concentrated on. Her brown hair is, in the manner of a trained templar, in the manner of a retired Knight-Captain, braided neatly and coiled closely to her head. 

They both look up at her as she steps over the threshold.

But it’s Evangeline alone whom she first looks at. Try as she might, there’s just no avoiding it. Like a dowsing rod to water, or a dog to a new scent, that’s where her attention always goes when she begins to share space with Evangeline de Brassard. And it’s hard to say exactly what it is that makes her do so. It’s too subtle of a shift that always occurs, accumulating on her skin like a fine, barely there, unutterably unmissable mist, an insistent gossamer web that pulls against her without leaving any sorts of impressions. Every time the women comes into her vicinity she gets this creeping feeling. Each time it comes, it coalesces too, until it’s a faint chime that is consistent enough to actually be tuned out. After eight months spent on the same estate, no matter how impressive its size, Althea’s become accustomed enough to regard this as a quirk that she really doesn’t care to mull over beyond remarking upon it, to herself, from time to time. Even if the sensation strikes her sometimes as something that’s saying, _Hey, are you sure you don’t want to give me a longer look?_ she tries to be better than her urges. Given the status of her stump she knows personally how awful it feels to be the subject of lingering glances. It’s always worse if they come from those whom you consider good acquaintances. 

As it often is, something in her bristles at being brushed aside, but it cannot resist the push. She smiles in such a way that closes her eyes and tilts her head with the weight of it. 

“Good afternoon, Rhys. Evangeline.”

“Hello, Althea.”  

As far as she’s concerned, they’re both saying it to her. 

“Well, don’t let me interrupt whatever you’re doing. I’m just here to get some reports together and give them a final coat of paint. I’ve got a meeting with Cullen in the afternoon.”

“Ah, of course. Don’t let us keep you from your work. Unless you want to be,” Rhys says, and he laughs amiably. His eyes are brown and warm and they do his face a great service. They soften him, make his full beard and dark hair and sharp features no where near sinister. Evangeline is beautiful, too, but hers is a face that isn’t made ugly and horrifying by just a hard, stern, or stressed look. There are wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and nose that limn how much her former life strained her. Rhys though, he’s just a few shades away from presenting as the stereotypical hellacious mage who burns and bleeds his enemies away with malicious aplomb and sauve composure. 

While he isn’t exactly gentle, he’s actually far too emotive to outwit anyone. Even Evangeline can keep him in check on a very, very off day. 

“Are you all right?”

Rhys has spotted the way she holds her arm close to her when she’s much less than halfway to her space. For a few seconds she stands still, as if she actually has a decision she could make about responding to him. As if she could ignore his care and concern and the comfort he’ll probably offer her very soon. 

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just forgot how tightly templars are able to hold onto things.” A slight lapse passes, and she realises the irony and the bland, easy-to-make quip in what she’s saying. “You know, like their swords.”

“They certainly were taught to hold onto those around mages,” Evangeline adds, to Rhys’ evident mild approval. He’s always struck Althea as a man who likes humour, preferring it to other, lesser reactions. Like anger, rage, or acting with a complete lack of reason. He’s actually capable of being quite funny when he can get his timing right. 

All the same, after smiling at Evangeline and chuckling, he gets up and comes over to Althea. With him comes the ever pervasive scents of cider and clean robes that seem to follow wherever he goes, whenever he happens to be going there. It’s possible that this is Evangeline’s doing. 

Faintly, but noticeable to her, as out of place as a crimson thread dangling from his forehead, are the traces of spirits around him. Recently he’s been in contact with one or several of them. 

Fair enough. Just because he’s here as a healer, doesn’t mean that’s all he has to use his abilities for. Before even being asked, she obediently offers out her one arm for him to take and inspect. With a little dip into his mana, he takes the imminently painful edges off of the bruises—they should end up being more pink and yellow than black and blue by the time they fully form as marrs upon her skin. 

“See, not so bad,” Althea says, with an incline of her head. Done accepting his help, she takes back her arm to herself and lets it hang by her side. She’ll see to healing herself the rest of the way later. 

“Still, there’s no rule here that says we mages can’t help each other from time to time.”

Casting her gaze away, she looks at Evangeline, who is engrossed again by whatever she’s reading. Oblivious to being watched, she’s unaware completely of the twitch that the inscrutable peculiarity about her causes in Althea’s watching eyes. And even Althea isn’t actually consciously aware of it happening—most tremors and spasms and convulsions and bodily oddities she attributes automatically to the state of her recent sleep schedule. The motes of apprehension which flicker every so often across her skin are like brief little itches, and gone in the short time it takes for her to reach and scratch them. The doubts in her mind remain inchoate and abandoned for their lack of inherent interest. Mushy, bland, dollops of dough never baked into something that might actually draw some attention. 

“Thank you, Rhys.”

“Of course. Anytime. We’re all here to help each other.”

That’s a nice way to look at it. And it’s not untrue.

“Thank you,” she says. 

Then she gets to work and, when Rhys and Evangeline leave together to get something to eat at the tail-end of lunch, Althea barely notices that it’s easier for her to work. Her concentration comes more readily than she’d expected it to when she started working in the company of others. Preparing the papers doesn’t take her as long as she’d prefer it to. So, with nothing else to do, she returns to her bedroom, cleans up, tidies her things, folds her discarded shift up before placing it atop her laundry, and then lays on the foot of her bed with its pile of blankets and furs and stares into the shadows lurking in the empty, ashless hearth. Vaguely the sounds of the afternoon service reach her, and once she wonders what it might be like to take a nap. What an indulgent luxury that might be welcome at a time like this. 

 

**.**

 

She gets up, and she goes, and she delivers the asked for documents detailing progress to Cullen. 

They say some things to each other, like the comrades they are, and then she has nothing to do for many hours. 

On departing, she repeats a statement of his she doesn’t disagree with. “Everyone is working hard. The clinic is making progress.” And, because he is a good and pleasant person who rarely gives himself any of the credit no-one else would deny that he deserves, she adds, “I think this was a good idea. Really. You’ve allowed people to make a difference. You’ve allowed people to get better. That’s more than most would have given them.”

Both the lyrium addicts and the mages could have had it so much worse after everything. It would have been so hard for them to find anything approximating a sliver of peace they can find here amongst well-intended strangers. 

The words she uses to express this echo dully in her head. They then sink like so many heavy, useless stones dropped into a black, unwholesome pool brimming with murk and other indeterminate, obscure things. They cause ripples and kick up silt, slightly, but even when all their aftermath has long since settled, you couldn’t possibly see where they might now lie on the filthy, unfiltered bottom. They will remain untended in the undredged depths. 

And yet, he smiles at her before she goes. He must be too kind and caring to not pretend like he can’t see, hear, and sense all that is lacking within her. Or, that’s what she’d tell herself, if she didn’t know he’s just finally had some good fortune in his life. It seems like it has blinded him to things he never should have to face again.

 

**.**

 

The ringing of the bell crashes outwards into the night and shatters its serenity. Midnight services will begin soon. 

Now that it’s come time for her next required activity, she feels she’s ready for bed. It’s hard for her to believe how hollow out and used up she feels. Even her mana responds sluggishly to her attempt to conjure a magelight into her dark room. In the end she has to summon a wisp, a small snap of sentience that trills at her in an nearly impossibly excited way. She is reminded of how joyful anyone can be when their fundamental desires are fulfilled. Its exuberance is hard to bear.

Cupping the little being in her palms, she asks it quietly, “Will you hang around for a few moments to share with me some of your light? Then you can go back home.”

The wisp shivers, and its luminous presence becomes even more intense. It flits upwards and buzzes around the ceiling and it illuminates everything with its generous, energetic arcs. Moving among everything that basks in the delicately blue glow, Althea reattaches her prosthetic to her stump and then she leaves the room. For a few brief moments she feels the wisp coming after her. Then, after a strange cheerful cheeping anyone in the hall could have heard, it departs back to the Fade that lies across the Veil that is remarkably thin here.

On her way to the service she encounters only a few other people—several templars, one older mage. This is a bit noteworthy. Normally she’d see at least ten more. Despite the lateness and coolness and the reforming, deepening silence of the night, this is a service more well-attended than the one given in the late afternoon. Perhaps, if anyone asked, she could say why it is so, because there’s an appeal to her that others might share. An excuse to get up and be about at such a strange and awkward time is exciting—it’s a chance to explore the world when it is different from how it’s normally and properly experienced. In the Circle, she had been one of the many mages who managed to slip away once from the crowd walking blearily from the chapel back to their rooms in the winding, silent, barely familiar hallways. Before she had actually passed over into a world of broken rules and danger and looming consequences, the night had been tinged with a sense of the unordinary and the otherworldly, though those participating hadn’t forsaken sense completely, given that this whole ritual was sanctioned and encouraged by their keepers in the Chantry. 

Here, it’s just that this is the service that works best for her to go to in the course of her day. And she has to attend at least one. She’s been told that plenty. 

By the time she settles in the farthest back pew the priest leading the devout group has shepherded them to the point of the first of several intentional silences they will be lead through. This is a time for personal prayer, interrupted at the start when she had opened the door and it had announced her arrival with its not-quite-gone creak that no amount of oiling or maintenance seems to be able to cure it of. To compensate for this intrusion and demonstrate her contrition to the miffed priest, she bows her head along with everyone else, and continues to participate for the entire duration of the service.

Her lips move with the muscle memory her over-long years with the Inquisition can’t dim or dull. She was a ward of the Chantry for most of her life, and that means she knows certain things. The winking of the candles may be beautiful and mysterious on the darkened, inwardly reflecting surface of the stained glass windows, but the sight is not enough to allure her. There is more comfort in the effortless repetition of rebukes and promises it doesn’t matter if she believes in or not. They aren’t her words to be scrutinised and picked-apart and examined for goodwill or ill-intent. 

This kind of tacit surrendering to doesn’t bother her. It’s for a short duration and, once, in the past, a distance that’s unfathomable to her now, this was a ritual that was important to her. It had meant something to her. And isn’t it also nice to pretend you could be a part of something for a change?

At the end of it she stays on her knees and keeps her head down. Imagining blackness and hearing nothing, the tramping footsteps and rustling clothing of the tired congregants leaving past her don’t cause her to stir. Eventually even the priest—who is a human woman despite all the Divine’s recent reforms—has departed.

Time passes. The candles remaining burn down. The eternal flame at the altar persists in its warmth and light in the cradle of its silver font.

Then, someone is next to her, and waiting. But they are polite about it. Coming upon a knocked over hourglass, they inspect it for cracks, but otherwise leave it unhandled because it is not their property. They will stand by until its owner has come to reclaim and right it. 

Is he watching her? It doesn’t make much difference, she thinks, the first thought to disturb her placidly flat mind. There’s no way he could actually see her in the dusk of this chapel, or the eye-watering blaze of the sun.

Muttering to herself something that could seem like the closing of a prayer, she lifts her head up and turns it to her side. 

“Good evening,” Cullen says to her. He moves to get on his knees besides her. He takes up a significant amount of space.  

Given her size, a lot of things seems larger to her than they really are. She tends to underestimate their impact. “Good evening, Cullen. Would you like some privacy to pray?”

“No. You can stay. You were here first.” He smiles at her. Again. His is such a wholesome presence. Even when it’s not only them it’s impossible to ignore him, the nervous, winsome vigour that he naturally radiates. She has never found him to be unattractive. He just wasn’t the one she chose. 

“It was a lovely service.”

“It was.” For her, it’s always a bit of a challenge to discern a pause from a stop in his part of a conversation. Multiple years to build familiarity haven’t quite been enough for her to learn the cadence of his speech. It always varies so much, depending on whom he’s talking to. But she was right to wait because he ends up adding the point to his return to this place, “I have something for you.”

From his thick, reddish coat laid over no armour he produces a bundle. She takes it from him, and unwraps the white oilcloth of average quality to find a candle that looks just as unremarkable as the hundreds set about the entirety of the chapel they are in.

And it is that. It’s just a candle. 

The thing that’s of interest to her is the briefest of blue-white shimmers. With a slight turn the entire side of it catches her attention with a single scintilla that reveals to her an easily unseen form. 

She looks up at him, and he says, “It’s from the priest. She thought you might like to light one of your own.”

“Thank you, Cullen.”

Again, silence that she cannot define. Deliberate, or its unmeant. 

There’s something she should tell him, but she doesn’t know how. She can’t ask him to do what should be done.

The next thing he does is get up and place a hand near her. On the pew before her upon which she has rested her hand he loosely curls his large fingers. 

“Good night. I hope you get some rest.”

“And you, too. Good night, Cullen.”

There’s no way he’ll know unless she tells him.

He leaves after that.

When she’s by herself, she holds the candle in both hands, and she gives it all of her attention. Mana begins to quicken, it takes a shape resembling the one she wills it to, and leaks out, and it touches the faultless surface in her palms. Suddenly, she can see all of the message meant for her spelt out in fine lyrium dust embedded in the wax: 

_It’s time to go north the other way around._

So. 

Since Cullen will have received this message too, she chooses to tie up this end now. Standing up, she takes the candle with her over into an alcove and places it to stand among dozens of its peers. Once her hands leave it the lurid message vanishes and is replaced by a spectral mental image shining in the place where she saw it. It’s easy for her to reach out again and light the candle and then force it to burn down until it’s nothing but a bit of waxed fused with the rest that has been accumulating in this corner of the chapel. The lyrium was a catalyst to this process.

That accomplished, she turns, she leaves, she goes back to her room. 

Eventually she ends up in her night dress with her stump unencumbered. By the large window, she surveys the view she soon won’t be seeing any longer. One of the moons is setting, its pale ghost all that can be seen through the thick clouds that have devoured it. It’s slowly descending from its place of pride among the innumerable stars she cannot see. The known constellations shine somewhere out there.

For hours she just sits at the window with her forehead leant up against the cold unyielding glass. 

She still isn’t able to explain to others who should know why it is that they shouldn’t trust her—why they probably can’t, though she has no way of being sure. And how could she tell them that she’s being stalked, haunted, followed through both wending dream and shocking nightmare, but not preyed upon? How could she convey that she is not in danger but that doesn’t mean they themselves might not be safe from this same predator? 

All she has to do is close her eyes long enough and she’ll see the dark wolf watching her from the same ineffable, uncrossable distance. No matter how she tries to reach, to climb, to struggle to get to him, he has never needed to move to stay beyond her. 

Probably he knows everything about her. So, to keep him away, she does not give him an opportunity to see her. So long as she does not sleep, he cannot so easily find her and watch her with his unwavering gaze. She’s thought of it as a mournful one too, before, but it’s hard to say exactly. It’s been months since she’s seen it. There’s no way of knowing what he’d really been feeling the last time he caught the sight of her.

If thwarting him this way may potentially kill her, that really doesn’t concern her. There are so many other dangers in the world that threaten her. Her death is unlikely to be one that’s in spite of him. It’s more likely to be the culmination of someone else’s lust and machinations, or just the conclusion of natural causes.

That’s something, she thinks to herself, alone. 


	2. ii.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The former Inquisitor and a few other figures return to Haven briefly. One of

Coming around the corner of snow dusted ridges and rocks, she thinks she’s ready. What’s about to come is the one thing she’s been consistently thinking about on the two-days’ ride over. Her Dalish All-Bred and the Ferelden Forder she gave to Cullen last year both have made the journey in respectable time. So it wasn’t so long she had for this mental preparation, to inoculate herself against an overtly negative reaction, but still, she has tried to ready herself for this moment. Even as they passed the twice-ravaged debris of the temple, even as they traversed the questionable tunnel through the avalanche she had single-handedly caused, this inevitable first view is what consumes the worries and hopes she currently has the capacity for. 

They make it around the bend, and Haven comes into sight.  

Neither of them command the horses to stop. The animals keep moving along the cleared road. They don’t need any input for several seconds—they do recognise this place. 

She, with both her hands on the reins, tries to comprehend it. It seems inconceivable to her now that she survived the onslaught that turned an entire fortified village, with all of its brave spirits and devout supporters sworn to their cause, into the rubble heap they have arrived at. It’s less than a ruin. Most of what stood here before is either burnt or buried or was long ago salvaged to further serve the Inquisition. What’s left is completely irretrievable. 

She blinks, and her first sight has come to an end, and she can think, at least partially, about something else. Unlike broken dreams, these ruined things can be rebuilt.

Besides her, Cullen ventures, “It’s looking better than the last time we were here.”

Just because it’s a true thing, doesn’t make it meaningful, or significant. 

“I’m glad Divine Victoria has taken an interest in seeing Haven preserved as an historical site.”

“You mean, you’re glad the Chantry let her?” he asks, and there is humour drifting towards her. He does know her, after all.

“I don’t think the Chantry could actually stop her from doing anything. Not if it’s she wanted to.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Rather than leave the horses where they once had been kept in rickety stables, they ride in further, past the gate, through rotting wreckage, up close to the only substantial structure standing. Squat though it is compared to most of its grander siblings, this Chantry building will be a welcome shelter in the cooling nights they are to stay here. It seems miraculous to her that it could have survived so wholly in-tact. Really looking at it, as Cullen comes to help her from her saddle with one hand around her waist, she fails to discover any stark evidence of damage. Probably this durability is something that has been called a miracle by someone. It ought to be cited more than her plodding catching up to everyone she had managed in the aftermath. What has been dubbed a return not from the brink, but a return from the certain death they ascribed to her when things had become their bleakest. 

Someone in cleric garb whom Althea doesn’t recognise emerges from the building. A human male from what she can see, Fereldan too if his accent is to be judged authentic, he offers to see that their mounts are taken to the new temporary stables. “You’re expected inside. The Chantry has been cleared out so you can pray in peace.”

“Thank you. Maker watch over you,” she says, and she gives a bow so her face is not seen by either of the men when she invokes this divine name and its contrary blessing.

“And may He watch over you.”

He leaves, and Cullen is thoughtful enough to reopen for her the door upon which he had once nailed the Inquisition’s first proclamation. Their cover story is something mundanely solemn and sentimental, something about taking a pilgrimage to the location where most agree the chaos first started to commemorate the many dead. The pilgrimage itself is more notable than the feelings that are said to motivate it. Few are allowed to undertake this journey yet by the Chantry, few get permission from the Divine, they are mostly told to wait until it’s been more sorted out. It’s a dangerous place they ask to tread. And, while that may be alluring and tantalising to some, it is also a liability and a true threat. There has not been enough time to tell what may yet be lurking around the scar left guttering, and watching, in the sky. Already there’s been a rumour of several leftover Venatori coming to cry skywards for Tevinter’s last possible hope to return. 

Dorian had said it was possible something like that could have happened the last time she talked to him. Though, cautioning her from the crystal hanging around her neck, he reminded her, not ungently, of the way things work in reality, reality being something that cannot be controlled, and only sometimes successfully influenced to go a certain way. No matter what he or anyone in Tevinter did, there were simply too many people to account for in an empire. Even one on its last decrepit, trembling legs. And anyway, the Venatori hadn’t been exclusive to the north for some time now. There had been plenty of southern converts. 

Passing into the gloom, surrounded by blackish traces of flames that had loped along the walls, Althea reaches up to pull her riding cloak a bit closer to her reflexively slumping shoulders. It’s still instinct for her to make herself smaller in larger, high-vaulting places of worship. And, all of the history she has here, it’s suddenly upon her like a physically heavy chill. Her throat constricts, it hurts to hold the cold air in her lungs. Right where she’s presently stepping—this is where Chancellor Rodrick heard he was going to die, and where he was allowed a final moment of faith. 

To Cullen, she turns. “Was it always this quiet?”

“Do you ever remember it being like this when we were here? Imagine how much more work we could have gotten done if it had been.” 

“No, I mean—before the Breach. Before the Inquisition was founded. When you and Cassandra and Leliana first got here.”

Saying nothing, committing to nothing yet, he looks at her with a furrow etched deeply in his brow. He seems to be trying to figure out what she could be asking him about, what sort of intentions could lie behind it. Though really, it’s as simple as what she’s presented. She just wants to know about what it sounded like. Or what it didn’t. Calling the Divine by her given name, as per an honest request from a friend, she seems to still be able to effectively catch him off guard and force him to riddle himself with discomfort. His nerves are quite obviously frenzied by his fit of anxiety.

Finally, enough of it passes for him to relax the rammed-straight rod of his spine. He crosses his arms over his chest, and he says to her, “There were already a lot of people before we got here. Divine Justinia wanted this to be a place of refuge. There were also many who needed a place to stay during the Conclave.”

“Ah, well.” She smiles. It’s a wan thing, and taut for its small size, and any amusement it conveys is at the expense of herself. She could have figured out the answer he gave her herself, and maybe she should have too. Asking would have saved him some—admittedly unforeseen—anxiety.

In silence, she begins to head towards the dungeons. 

“Right,” Cullen says, and begins to follow her on her descent.

“My lodgings were at the temple itself. I was probably kept close on purpose though. Even then I was a mage of some repute.” Shaking her hand airily for him to see, the one which these days wields her staff when she uses it, she indicates the intended, but not necessarily present, lightness of her remark. Moving on, quickly, “But I was only there a day before the explosion.”

“You didn't miss anything. Besides some shoving and interesting complaints, the only exciting thing that happened at the Conclave was you.”

“Lucky me,” she says, and laughs flatly, and the echoes without a melody sound even hollower.

They’ve come to the final heavy door, through which Cassandra had led her a long time ago, in a different world. When she was known as a prisoner, it was the threshold crossed over leading to what she thought would have to be the most important thing that could ever happen to in her one mortal life. The door is unlocked this time, and they are both expected on the other side. 

Around the grand imposing table are gathered two people tightly involved in their current conversation. It takes them several seconds to acknowledge that it’s no longer just them around the wartable. The first one to break off and look up isn’t surprising to see down here. Blonde-haired and with ears unhidden, Charter meets the former Inquisitor with a fierce blue gaze. Though it was Leliana who trained her and appointed her and trusted her to take over her place, the elf still gives a measure of respect to Althea when she salutes with her hand touched to her chest and bows her head below a normal nod.

The other woman, she is much more of a surprise. But then, she’s always been something of a wildcard to any organisation—Fiona, the founder and head of the burgeoning College of Enchanters, is present in the dungeons of Haven. She does not salute. She gives both Cullen and Althea a neutral but not unfriendly nod. 

“You weren’t expecting me,” Fiona says for the two of them.

“Well, no. But to be fair, I wasn’t sure exactly who to expect. But I did expect more,” Althea says, and she crosses over worn stone floor to stand at the closest side of the familiar table. She rubs her thumb along a gash she remembers making accidentally by dropping an over-full decanter of wine. She recalls the deep disapproval received from both Cassandra and Josephine, though she had been a bit proud of herself for casting fast enough to keep the liquid from saturating and staining the venerable wood. Across from the two elven women, she is not at a place of prominence. Cullen goes around to their side, settling closer to Tevinter than anyone else. 

“There are more of us,” Charter starts. “In fact, Fiona may want you to meet one of them right now.”

“If you don’t mind,” Fiona says, though her tone is more insistent, less hopeful. 

“Charter can get me up to speed on our preparations,” is what Cullen has to say. He is already at work, his gloves are off and he’s shuffling through reports and lists stacked on top of what was once Arlathan. He skims with the same ease as ever; the tireless management of his clinic has kept in practise. “We’ll be ready for you when you get back.”

“All right, then.” Still not sure what she’s just assented to, not sure that it really makes a difference in any way, she turns to Fiona, and then starts walking after the smaller woman. She has to hurry a few of her steps to keep up. She stumbles, she realises that she is out of practise speaking with others who don’t share their entire life with her.

“This is?” Althea tries.

“What?” A snap of a response, though Fiona isn’t necessarily impatient. The way she keeps her eyes stridently ahead of her tell of a mind that is preoccupied with something not currently within sight.

After swallowing, she tries again with a less dry mouth. “What it is that we’re doing?”

“You’ll see soon enough. It won’t be boring.”

Somehow, she hadn’t really thought that it could be. 

 

**.**

 

Their walk is silent and impersonal, and it takes them outside of Haven proper. They walk for at least half of an hour beyond the tumbled walls. By the time they apparently arrive at their intended destination, she has watched the sun inch closer to the rim of the well-known skyline surrounding them. This is a jagged, uneven thing that has shown up to haunt to many of her dreams. It’s hard to keep her eyes off of it.

The mouth of the tunnel they approach is startling well-concealed. She doesn’t actually see it until she follows Fiona, after what seems to her reasonable hesitation, up and over a group of lichen-lipped rocks. Once she has her feet back on the ground, she faces the sheer stony face of a hill, only to find that beneath her is nothing but a strip of rocky dirt keeping her from a perilously steep incline angling pointedly into the gloom, as if it’s serious about getting away from even a suggestion of sunlight. This would be a hard thing to find in winter and most of spring.

Looking to Fiona, she asks, “Lead the way?”

Probably because she should, not because it makes a difference to her whether or not it’s her taking point, Fiona conjures a robust light into the tip of her staff she’s used as a walking stick up until now. With one hand out in front of her to guide her, she moves into tunnel and then is gone. Only the white light trailing along the walls testifies to the truth that she has not completely vanished from the world. Without a staff of her own Althea clambers after the former Grand Enchanter with both hands on the surfaces around her to keep her balance. 

It is dark. It is airless. It is cold.

Unaccountably, it is dry. Whereas the air above them is humid without being musty, this cavern they are traversing together is desiccated as a sun-blanched bone. Frozen deserts are a thing, she reminds herself. There are tundras and ice-bound plains and wastelands where the water will never move again. It isn’t easy for her to decide if she would rather be here or in the Hissing Wastes as she remembers them—boiling, molten, trying actively to steal from her her life. Though, scrabbling for a spark of rationality, she realises these thoughts are probably the claustrophobia starting to oppress her, perturbed as it is by the imminent threat of closing choking earth-bound walls. By kicking up apprehension it may serve to immobilise her with enough trepidation. 

But, primal and cloying as this resonate fear may be, it’s not really a match for her fear of what would happen if she were to turn around right now and abandon the unknown task at hand. What kinds of questions she would have to answer? The embarrassing, unanswerable sort.

So, actively fighting against her strained breathing, she forces herself to follow the back of the woman in front of her until they have to hunch over and sidle sideways through a crevice barely wider than the length of her palms placed by one each other. A human female considered by most to be smaller than she should be, she has to remove her cloak to make it through. The narrow passage continues on for several hundred cautious steps.

Then, she is where she needs to be. 

The room around her is cast in the unearthly radiance of subterranean fungi and—even more impossible—streaking veins of lyrium glittering amongst thousands of clusters of green. The veins seem shy, somehow, shallow for all their gleaming. 

If she didn’t know better she’d say—what? They were artificially made? If that’s true, surely they would be less crude? Or they were meant to imitate something vaguely organic. The bright cyan of the place, it puts her in mind of intentions, however secret and furtive. The whispering traces of the lyrium song shimmer over her skin and hint at something she is too uncovered to understand. 

Eventually Fiona turns to her. “Well? Quite something, isn’t it?” She gracefully extinguishes the light upon her staff no longer needed. 

“I can see why you didn’t want to explain it. How could you?”

“Exactly so,” comes a third voice to startle her.

She hadn’t noticed before, but another known person is present. Morrigan is kneeling on a laid out sheet of canvas covering enough space for her and an aged leather bag. On top of that is an open notebook and writing utensils that have not been used for awhile. The page she can see is blank—crisp and clean and ready to record observations. 

For a moment, Althea waits. She’s expecting another voice to greet her. But, she sees now, there are no children here. “Hello, Morrigan.”

“Fancy meeting you here. I see you and Cullen have finally arrived.” Given something that seems like it needs a good retort, that could offer her a chance for a witty quip, Althea fumbles. She just looks at Morrigan waiting for the next thing to come. “But I suppose you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Even if he is loyal.”

“No. He can’t learn how to fly,” Althea adds. Finally something a little bit clever coming from her. The tilt of a head and crack of a smile she gets in response feel to her like approval. “But I’m not exactly keen to learn either.”

“Your loss. Anyway.” A small gesture indicates to Althea that she should draw closer to see what Morrigan is working on on the wall. Accepting tacitly, with only a little shivering frisson of hesitation because she isn’t sure getting close to lyrium and fungus is the safest thing she’s ever done, Althea manoeuvres over the cavern’s debris-strewn floor to the older woman’s side. Close enough, she sees there are runes ensconced within embedded garlands of resplendent, living blue. She recognises them as neither elven nor Tevene. Whatever it is their long, neatly inscribed message means to say, she’s not the intended recipient. 

Shifting, brushing her hand in the air an inch above the compact writing and writhing strands of lurid lyrium, she suddenly recalls one of the mainly missions she’d authorised. There were runes like this found before near Haven—Alamarri of origin, if she remembers correctly. And translated to reveal a cipher. She had thought the keystone lost along with almost everything else in the attack. 

“The keystone was recovered some time ago,” Morrigan explains. Something in her hands is rustled; a manuscript is idly unrolled some. “But the ones who managed your first translation—I could not track them down. Tis a shame. When I have finished translating this, I will let you know.”

“Do you have any idea what it might say?”

“Something interesting, no doubt.” Then she turns back to her work. Within seconds, she is gone—retreated, sunken, enveloped within the arcane magic she had received with Althea’s consent. She appears to have a better grasp on it now after three years living with it. The trance she enters is peaceful as an intended meditation. 

Want for a missed opportunity begins to harry her, so she looks and steps away from the entranced woman. She leaves her to an esoteric reverie once reserved to those who were ordained to serve a wise protecting goddess. There’s no need to get in the way of an odd family bond, between a mother’s wisdom and her learning daughter, between a maternal archetype of an ancient people and the beloved child of her flesh.

Before the silence languishes into awkward quiescence, Fiona speaks out. “Take a closer look at the fungus.”

Althea does as she is bid without need for further incentive. The woman wouldn’t ask something of her without some sort of purpose. Clear or not to her why she’s doing it, she leans in, she looks. Fungi is thriving in a noticeably dry, bothersomely cold place. The lyrium beneath is threaded throughout all the rock, including the seemingly naturally-formed ceiling. Where parts of it have collapsed to the floor there are fewer veins to be seen, meaning that it’s concentrated towards the surface, like branching blood vessels and crucial capillaries. These collapsed areas are almost completely devoid of the fungal growth, looking naked without the luxurious covering sprawling nearly everywhere else.

She concludes that she was right initially, that this lyrium network is not natural. She also concludes that it is supporting the growth and flourishing of the fungus clinging superficially to the stone. As an additional bit of observation, she reaches forward and pulls off a chunk of the green, organic stuff. It is light and luminous in her gloved palm. Though, as the song continues on within her grasp, she feels the beginnings of the magic’s inexorable wavering and guttering. It won’t last without a source to feed it.

“This is not a native species. It is from farther north. Much farther,” Fiona says.

“And the lyrium is keeping it alive?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before. It’s….” It’s hard not to remember what she saw deep down under the earth in a place that should have been dark as the Void. The heart of a titan had been lit by an unseen and unfathomable sun with clouds crowding around an unceasing horizon. “It’s interesting. Have you ever heard of dwarves using lyrium for gardening before?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. As you can see.”

And she does look around her again. She just doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, or why. A hurting thought is crystallising, forcing her to bend and buckle under its increasingly bone-breaking weight: what would he have had to said, had they discovered it with him? What insights could he have offered her?

They stay longer, until they eventually leave. Night will be here soon. Morrigan, without her answer yet, breaks her trance long enough upon their departure to ask them to look after her son for a bit.  

 

**.**

 

The mention of a son reminds Althea of another thing she’d let slip from her mind. It’s a detail from her time in the Inquisition she’d thought was curious, maybe unfortunate for it meant an irreplaceable loss in their capable ranks, and that was it. Never was there any imagining it as potentially pertinent to anything that might come along in her future. Fiona had left Skyhold. At what point precisely, she does not know exactly. 

She starts remembering. Trying to find an answer within herself that she swears she should contain, she moves slower than the other woman, her contemplation taking up an amount of her effort, causing herself to lag behind. The strain on her brow is from this manifest struggle. 

Then, she’s drudged up some half-faded details, enough to examine and ponder holding herself on trial. The elven woman had asked about the Grey Warden who came to Skyhold. Alistair, it had been. In that part of the conversation the elven had stalled, she had for once stopped herself before something. Fiona had said in the end that it was his father, the king who sired a bastard son, he was the one wanted good things for Alistair. 

Fiona had disappeared after that.

Can she be more specific than that?

She tries.

Fiona had not been seen after Althea’s return from the Fade and the Inquisition’s journey back from Adamant. 

How had she left?

Maybe, Althea imagines, with the sting of an old wound beginning to stretch open after too much prodding, and the billowing bleeding which soon follows, Fiona left with hunched shoulders and tears staining robes she would soon discard. 

Now she walks with straight posture and slender shoulders squared, an elven mage who has survived the Grey Wardens, the Circle of Magi, magisters, everything in the world. And, apparently, the lasting loss of her boy. 

She is not sure how to broach this, she is not yet able to know how to try for the atonement she owes a mother from whom she stole a sweet, thoughtful, beloved son. The black weight of the guilt is the one thing she knows what to do with—it is best borne alone. The walk back to Haven is conducted in silence in the weak light of the declining sun, and the sputtering scar left in the sky. 

 

**.**

 

Taking dinner in the dungeons, she can be grateful for one thing at least. She is not technically imprisoned here. This is all a temporary arrangement. Come morning they will depart: Morrigan and her child and her. To further foster the nascent relationship of the College of Enchanters and the Chantry, Fiona will be remaining to help monitor the area for magical mishaps. Cullen has decided to stay on to help oversee everything else. It will be announced he’s here to help manage the site until it’s deemed safe enough to longer be in need of a supervisor with a talented mind for the martial. Rhys and Evangeline will take over running his clinic while he’s gone from it. 

As for those who are actually leaving soon, there is no official word on their whereabouts. They are still private citizens. Discretion for them is best, out of consideration for what information about them is worth.

“An estate will be ready by the date of your arrival,” Charter continues, handing her a sheaf of paper that is a document. It’s not a deed. “This is your itinerary, roughly.”

Down to Gwaren to board the ship sailing to cross the Waking Sea. Ostwick is a stop. 

Then Antiva, to end in Minrathous, the brain of the beast. 

“Also, the Divine has a personal errand for you, if you happen to find the time while you’re there.” This single small sheet next handed to her, this is just a fine bit of paper with a name written on it. She has questions, but there are no answers she’s given after inquiries. Charter shakes her head and offers only, “this person is a gifted healer.

“You will be given your funds tomorrow.”

“I have plenty of--”

“You will be given sufficient funds and resources tomorrow, sister.”

Feeling a pleasant chill of submission starting to seep through her leaden limbs, Althea nods her head. So, this is it. The game has already started. She’s just another pawn playing a part for the Chantry, ostensibly. “I understand.” 

“Good.”

Done with the conversation for now, she tickles Kieran, who is presently practising shapeshifting as a young cat, behind his right ear. Against her thigh he rubs his head and then buries it. 

All the others are present in the dank room. She takes bites of her brown bread and swallows of her rabbit stew, slowly she consumes over half of what she has been served. By this time Charter has left the dungeon to go and retrieve something. Unfortunately she has to disturb poor Kieran who, adopting the lethargy of his animal of choice, has dozed off, but she thinks it’s maybe time to reunite him with his mother. Dishes in one hand, little tawny cat cradled against her chest, she makes her way towards the cell strewn with hay opposite of where she was sitting. Cullen, Fiona, and Morrigan are sitting together on the crude steps separating the cell from the very lowest level of the floor. 

“I believe this is yours, Morrigan.”

“Thank you,” says the mother, reaching out to take her child with both hands. Her grip is tender and firm, so gentle and so strong. She moves aside her empty dishes to lay him in her lap.

“You’re lucky he’s taken to shapeshifting. You wouldn’t be able to get much more time like this with him,” Fiona says. 

“And why is that, pray tell?”

“He’s getting bigger. And older.”

“You’d be surprised,” Morrigan says to the elf, and, from the haughty cant of her head, it’s clear that she’s not interested in saying much more on the subject, nor hearing more from a woman whom she thinks has never had children of her own. She’s right, at least, that Fiona has never had children of her own under her care.

The black haired human woman turns to Althea, gestures to the side of her vest where she has slipped her received documents. “Are you all ready for tomorrow?”

“As much as I can be.” There’s not much more to add to this; no witticisms are ready for her to amuse her audience with. Morrigan, who can appreciate and match humour with her own, regards Althea with a muddled mixture of disappointment, questioning, and inklings of understanding. 

Apparently, however, she’s the only one who’s noticed what she has. No-one else is realising the lack of replies that they should be expecting, and that Althea knows she failing to deliver. In the wide, barely lit room, Morrigan’s golden eyes glow with sharpening insight. 

“Anyway, what about you? Did you figure out what you needed to?”

“Yes. I know where I have to go now. One of those stops on your journey, tis going to be ours.”

As the woman rubs her son’s soft back, and gets plenty of purring in return, Althea processes this. For a few seconds she wonders if she can guess which stop it is. There aren’t too many options. “You won’t be joining me the whole way.”

“No, I’m afraid not. Are you disappointed?”

“I’ll just have to get someone else to hold back my hair while I puke up everything,” Althea says, and she even manages a twitch that turns into a small smile as Morrigan’s laughter fills up the dim, grim space. Both Cullen and Fiona seem engaged too. 

“Before we go, how about a round or two of Wicked Grace? If you don’t know how to play, no matter. I had a great teacher.”

The former templar suddenly becomes tense, easy as he is to force from one mood to another because of his nerves, and that seals the deal. There is a story here that Morrigan senses, one that she absolutely has to know. 

The stakes are low, but not insignificant. They play to have a good time.

 

**.**

 

Come morning, Althea is the first one to rise from her bedroll. She does not feel this is out of place; if anyone has anything to comment on, it is the apparent vigour which she possesses after a night in such a cold, damp place. Everyone else gets up stiff and sore with sleep by the time she has walked the grounds several times around to see precisely what is where and how things remain. 

This will change the landscape of her dreams, she thinks. She hopes that they will soon reflect the reality she’s seen. 

Eventually, her walking turns to wandering turns to wondering about the transformed place she has arrived at. This spot, which she has dreamt about many emotional times, has untold meaning to her. Devoid of enveloping snow it’s almost foreign, but the lingering traces of familiarity are enough to endear it to her. Nugs running along the bottom of the surrounding ridges chitter, among the misty shadows of the evergreens one bird calls out to another of its kind, a butterfly drifts up from breeze-lapped lake and disappears beyond what she can see. The vapour of her breath rises, rises, diffuses into nothing.

This is something new. She is going to remember it—a scene, with its sights, smells, sensations, all as yet unburdened by any associations that could come to clutter it. Her back is turned against the permanently sealed Breach.

From behind her comes a sound meant to attract her attention. 

Keeping her eyes closed, keeping her mind focussed, she fights back the thought that Charter sure is early, they must really be ready to get rid of her. 

Again, someone wants her to look at them. 

Relenting, she digs her heel into rigid, rim-crisp grass, and turns to face the breaker of her concentration. Ready to ask what is so important. Imply that, whatever it is, it could have certainly waited. Give a reminder of who she used to be. 

“Good morning,” says an elf to her, an elf who is certainly not Charter. 

He, Abelas, is probably the last person she expected to see waiting and wanting a response to his request for her attention. She looks at him, and it takes her several seconds to remember to make sure to check that her mouth is not slightly open, not revealing the unsightly tops of her teeth. Luckily she is not slack-jawed this morning.

“Hey,” she says, her soft word limp in the bright morning. The weak breeze is enough to nearly carry the greeting away. 

He takes a few steps closer to her. With a trained warrior’s effortless elegance, a menacing capability to protect, a killer’s deadly grace, as she’s always seen from him. They aren’t airs he’s wearing. It’s his training and his dedication, it’s who he essentially is expressed by the way he moves about the physical world. It matches what she’s come to understand about how elves—the elvhen—used to be: exaggerated and demonstrative and utterly vibrant in every aspect. No wonder those born in this Age were described to her as the same as the forsaken Tranquil severed from the Fade and locked within their own eternally placid minds. 

The old elf crosses his arms and openly regards her, eyes flicking several times from her feet to the top of her head with its flyaways. His stare is not one that is ever intentionally softened. 

She tries to straightened up even though she knows it’s too late. 

He already knows. In a strong tenor he prods her. “How long has it been since you actually slept?”

“I don’t really think that’s your business.”

“Yes, it is. If I am to be travelling with you it’s something I should know.”

That shatters her mounting defenses. Again, he has her off guard with the utterly unexpected. 

But now he’s at loss for a moment, brows twitching with something resembling annoyance, though without the extravagant flare to his nostrils common of his kind. A shake of his head, a shifting of his arms, and he is showing her a pouch laden with what has to be gold. It nearly shines louder than the burnished, enchanted metal of his spectacular armour. “They told you you were going to get funds and resources today. Here’re the funds. I’m the resource.”

“You want to go?”

He is honestly baffled by this question. It takes him a moment, to try and figure out why in the name of his departed goddess she is asking him this. 

To her it’s inexplicable to think that he would want to accompany her. Has he somehow not heard what she’s told the entire world? Has he so little regard for those whom he calls shemlens he doesn’t to listen a single thing they say, even true things pertaining to the state of his pantheon? “I mean, I am glad that you helped the Inquisition. But the Inquisition was disbanded, and then I didn’t see you. I had assumed you’d gone on to something else.”

“It hasn’t been long since I met you.”

“To an immortal, maybe.”

They both stand there, sizing each other up. Though the elvhen aren’t giants, they tower over her notions of modern elves. Compared to him she feels tall as a dwarf and as sophisticated as a drunken one. Yet something about her—even without the mark of true magic to bolster her—seems to be enough for him. He deems her worthy of continued company and the effort of explanation. This, when she would have thought he wouldn’t have to put up with her, or any other shemlen, ever again.

Did she still have a spark of it, whatever it was that he had seen?

Abelas replaces the bag of metal currency from whence it came from inside his armour. His head tilts and he crosses his arms again. Regal though he may appear, to a shabby person like her, she is aware that he is not the most patient of people. “Well?”

“I guess I just don’t get it. You know about me, don’t you?”

“You’re the Inquisitor.”

“Not any longer.”

A shrug, as if it doesn’t have any infinitesimal bearing on anything. “All right.”

“There are other things. I—”

“You walked in our libraries, fought in our sacred places, were nearly consumed by a god’s misplaced power. You were the Dread Wolf’s lover. You have made a promise to thwart him. You will not seek his death as justice for your people if you can help it.”

Silence, sharp as a barbed whip. The lash burns hot as a melted strip down her back. Her spine aches along the trails of her over-fired nerves.

“What do you want me to say, Abelas? I’m sorry?”

Not to be interrupted, he snaps his hand up to command her to silence. For all that he is lost and adrift in this world he is not without his past. He has been a leader, a general, a role model to the youth, for untold generations.

“You showed humility when in supplication to Mythal. We served the All-Mother. We don’t serve the Dread Wolf.”

She looks up, at him. She shields her eyes from the radiant brilliance of his outrageous armour. Morning it may be, he has drawn up his hood around his pale, eloquent face. In the shade provided by it his vallaslin are a poignant testament to him. His name echoes in her mind, recalling what he believes has become the point of him.

“You never saw who drank from the vir’abelasan, did you? You left before we worked it out amongst us.”

With a scoff, he waves his hand, to dismiss whatever point she’s raising. He points instead directly toward the centre of her sternum. “I know you are not under the geas. I know you are not in service to Mythal. But, you honour her, and her spirit, whether you know it or not. I believe that helping you will help her.”

She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t comprehend how he could liken her to an Evanuris, to the divine being he served. She is not at all like the mighty woman he once worshiped—she is so much less than.

But, selfish as it may be, she accepts. His help and his company are welcome to come along with her. What she won’t accept, won’t she won’t tolerate even if she sometimes needs to remind others of who and what she was—he gets to one knee, and she rushes downwards to kneel before him.

“All right, then. You’re coming with me to Tevinter?”

His golden gaze is direct, it is piercing her breathless to her hurtling heart as they sit next one another on bended knees. He says, “I believe I’ve already said yes.”


	3. iii.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A witch, a child, an elvhen man, and a woman whom she regards as a cripple in disguise board an Antivan boat. The first stop is Ostwick, where trouble seems inconveniently to be brewing.

Something bothers her. Like a worm it has burrowed into her skin and coiled unimaginably tight. The moist loops of it nuzzle against the lower, intimate layers of her. It would not, she feels, be incorrect to call this seething invader a parasite. Something that is in all ways foreign. Such is the creeping feeling that has been growing within her like a swelling tumour.

She is currently conveying onto the ship a crate into which their belongings have been placed to disguise them as cargo. The sum of their lives is easy enough for her to carry. The only pain caused by this is in the end of her left arm—which is nothing new, that’s something that’s always there when she’s forced to be aware of it. She herself is covered entirely in borrowed clothing; the loose leathers she wears are folded several times to fit her even poorly, the greying cotton shirt beneath sags where it is stuffed into her gloves, a heavy cloth hat crudely covers the mass of her hair tightened and tucked against the back of her neck and concealed further by the large lump of her let-down hood. Already she has been mistaken for a particularly young, particularly slender, boy. One woman thought she was an elf who chooses to wear shoes. 

“Nice boots,” the woman had said, a Fereldan citizen who did not question the validity of her compliments, or her opinions. “They really are worth wearing, aren’t they?”

Saying nothing at all, Althea had simply left when spoken to like this. She went upstairs and joined Abelas in retiring early to stay in her own room above the tavern alone. She was there until Morrigan, turning in for the night, came to check on her and bid her a good sleep. Afterwards, still in an unshed disguise, she went back down to get one last drink of Fereldan beer, but by then she had missed her chance. The staff had gone to bed. In a few hours Abelas would be getting up with the sun. That morning he watched her—she could feel his gaze on her every time physical weakness started swimming up before her watery awareness was silted up and solidified and finally stabilised by a significant consumption of black coffee.

Now, later this same day, he has gone on ahead of her. He has already boarded the ship, walking on amongst most of the crew that rose early to have everything ready for their departure by midday. Morrigan and Kieran are currently somewhere, probably hidden together as a pair of some kind of clever animal. They will not need to leave traceable evidence of their presence on any kind of manifest. 

As for her, she will be one of the last ones onboard. Supposedly what she’s carrying is the final load of a semi-precious, easily spoilable cargo: chunks and chunks of unshaped amber. Although it has been years since the dress she wore featuring fine beads of it dazzled the Orlesian court, the trend it set is still current in some circles in sunny Antiva. Josephine, whom Leliana said looks good adorned with the stone, is said to be particularly looking forward to this shipment. 

Her disguise, her cover, her transportation, and her supposed destination. All of it has been seen to to be thoroughly secure. Still, something has unsettled her. It’s pooling in her clammy pores and seeping into the skin, compromising her, like an illness weakening her immunity to worse things. There’s something she’s missing. 

Physically, she has the sensation that it’s something behind her. She stops walking, halfway up the gangplank. She is suspended between land and ship over the churning waves of the off-green sea. The sun is nearly directly overhead throwing shadows down below her. Above her seagulls swarm and cackle to each other as waves wash over barnacles clinging to everything by the slimey thousands.

This is odd. This is unfamiliar. The worm twitches and writhes against the inner parts of who she is, trying to refuse a parting from it. She ventures forward another step and the feeling does not diminish, it only grows more poignant, like it’s sharpening into a point, a point on the tip of a blade suddenly threatening to slide up along her side and slip into her heart.

But she cannot linger. Her cover cannot be blown. If she were to risk it, it couldn’t be over something like this. It’s not just her depending on her discretion now. 

So, she forces herself. Step upon step, she moves up, away from the quay, closer to the deck until she is on it, then below it, stacking the crate among others indistinguishable from it. Later, she will come to recover it and retrieve everyone else’s things she has been put in charge of. 

She will do it. Later.

Now she is driven to take advantage of finally being out of the sight of strangers. Free, unhindered as she can be when cursed immediately by unconquerable queasiness upon anything less steady than rigid ground, she needs to be in the crew’s quarters fast as can be. There she drops herself into her swinging net of a bed, tears off the poor hat pinned to her head, rips off her prosthetic, and covers herself with a woolen blanket right before the thing festering within her finally bursts and overwhelms her. 

Transfixed, all she can do is lay there, gently swaying, witnessing the outpouring trying to drown her senses. There are some physical symptoms: her skin cools, her cheeks burn, the weight of her limbs becomes untenable, her stinging eyes pinch shut. Then this feeling reaches her mind, and it makes her entire self inhospitable to thought. All that’s left to her are her emotions. 

She lays quiet for a long time.

Alone, she finally recognises sadness, and, with dulled facilities, she finds its source after it’s too late to matter. She’s already taken her last step on the land that gave her her first home. This sadness caused by loss will just have to be borne. So she yearns instead for the peace and relief and blackness of sleep she knows she cannot allow herself. Not yet.

 

**.**

 

For several days she doesn’t see her travelling companions. Morrigan and Kieran are nowhere to be found; the ancient elf is rendered a crippled hermit tied indefinitely to his bed. The Antivan crew members try to talk to her, attempting to engage her in conversation or attract her attention with familiar social cues common in all of Thedas like smiles and even a few outrageous winks. They are known to the right people—who vetted and spied upon them extensively no doubt—so she can be sure can trust them, but still, she finds it easier to keep to herself. The effort of speaking does not make her burden of hollowing sickness any easier to bear; a positive distraction is not provided by any of these well-meaning men. Even the braggadocious captain, who is sober when drunk and drunk when sober, with skin that reminds her unvarnished expensive wood, does not give her as wide of a berth as she wishes for.

In fact she finds she prefers dealing with the less important and superstitious crewmates who embody the gruff, wind-hardened sailors who live in most people’s imaginations as unabashedly vulgar stereotypes. They refuse to get close to her. It’s well known to men like them that women aboard ships bring nothing but hardships. They do not need her thanks, nor would they appreciate them. All the same she is thankful not everyone needs to be turned away.

It’s not until Denerim has been passed without incident that she is given any meaningful indication that she is not facing this journey alone among strangers. 

Abelas, who is normally pale enough to glow both in light and dark, finally emerges to the sun looking like a specter’s shadow. He has been more afflicted by seasickness than her. The first thing he does in the unmitigated daylight is slink over to the ship’s starboard railing and lean over towards the murky horizon. As she looks at him the bone-white of his mussed braid stands out to her despite the arcane wonder of the spell-stitched armour he has apparently refused to stop wearing. This is the first time she has seen his hair, she thinks. 

After letting him have a while she approaches him. Her urge to reach out and lay a comforting, sympathetic hand on his cramped shoulders is overridden by a greater sense of needed space. In his situation, she would rather be given room than reassurances that she is not the only one suffering. Such a reminder is never helpful in the way it’s intended. Knowing you’re not the only one miserable doesn’t make your suffering any less, there’s only a chance that it can help you get something like perspective that this too will end.

“Still not used to this, I see.” And she smells it. The pungent sting of brine is not enough to overcome the acrid tang of stale air clinging to him. These bilious emanations encourage her to keep giving the both of them ample space to breath in. 

Unable to turn to face her, he gives a violent shrug of his shoulders that looks almost like a shudder, and the jerk is in her direction. If she didn’t know him better, it would seem he begrudges her her slight, and marginally more stable, legs. But she does know him—he’s too self-aware to not know what’s actually the problem. The fact that he is weaker than her is his own failing, he will think, she thinks. It has nothing to do with her.

“I don’t understand,” he says slowly, “how anyone with your short lifespan has managed to accomplish anything.”

“Well,” she begins, though, at least when she starts, she isn’t sure where she’s going with her response. He is sour, in her experience, but his bitterness is not something she has ever found aimed at her. This isn’t incentive directed at her. Rather, a general denigration of everyone who isn’t immortal makes more sense coming from him, given his state, when he’s feeling vulnerable and stricken by something over which he has no control. While there are a few places in the world left where he could wield again a portion of the influence he had had in his goddess’ temple, here, out on the water, with no way available to him to cure or rectify what’s ailing him, his moodiness is magnified. The fact that he’s also just feeling ill—a physical state which he may never have been in before—certainly doesn’t help. The thought of this has inspired her to try and make light of it, for his sake. “Maybe we’ve just learnt how to take it slow.”

Her levity isn’t appreciated. It doesn’t make a difference to the slump of his shoulders, or the blood-stunting grip of his hands on the wooden rail he’s bracing his weight against. “The state of your transportation is appalling. Why hasn’t the brevity of your time driven you to figure out something half as convenient as eluvians?”

“Maybe,” she says to him, “we just enjoy watching others be miserable.”

“No,” he says. Again, she has not been successful in her endeavour to make him feel better. He turns to her slowly, staggering his response until he is facing her and seeing, with his body leant fully against the rail in case they pitch again, her where she is standing with the distance she has maintained from him. By the look his eye, he seems ready to reprimand everyone. By his posture, however, he seems to be somewhat chastened by his less than imposing state. Still, he starts, “That’s not it. You aren’t—”

Whatever it is that she isn’t or humans aren’t, it isn’t going to be the next thing out of his mouth, for he lurches, and moans, and then is stretching over the side of the ship once more. For several minutes he is too wretched to speak to her. Up they rise with a crest, down they go with a trough, through waves they plough. A dolphin following them skims the surface with its fin and then jumps up, out of the lurid blue, into the air for them to see. 

Though still sullen with himself he turns to her again. This time there is a little froth in the corner of his mouth he quickly wipes off, as well as something running from his nose that is cleared away with a stroke of an arm against his face. His hands moves along his cheek, across his temple, ending with three fingers pressing into the shaved skin above the point of his ear. He looks no better. Stress and exhaustion have left his blanched skin mottled with a smattering of red spots. The greying tone to him is not relenting. 

“I am going back down,” he tells her. And then, stumbling, he walks away from her. Towards the stairs, stopping a moment to balance himself against the guiding railing, shuffling downwards into the gloom of the hold, only his head is visible, now he is gone. 

Eventually she goes down too to seek relief from the hot burning of the sun and the cold burning of the wind. In the stench riddled intransigent semi-dusk she finds him with his back pushed resolutely up against a beam that above them turns into a tall and proud mast supporting the pageantry of sails propelling them northwards. His eyes are closed, his body is no longer rigid, and he has found an escape after all. He meditates, accomplishing what she, a human, cannot. She lays in her hammock interred in her roiling, aqueous body, sick enough that sleep is not possible, and blessed because of it. She is too exhausted to resist sleep in any other way. Nothing that could sustain her is staying down. 

 

**.**

 

The brutal afternoon and the harsh evening have been sheltered through curled up with her knees trembling against her chest. She collects herself, reattaches her one-of-a-kind left limb to her stump, and prepares herself for another bout with the fresh, open, exposed air above deck. This is several hours after she has heard Morrigan’s lilting tune of a voice saying something to her boy. She always sounds nice, but, when she’s speaking to Kieran, she’s even more mellifluous and pleasing to hear. It’s a distinction even a tone-deaf person—who considers herself as useful as a mute when it comes to singing, she’s brought down entire choirs before with a simple series of unharmonised notes—like her can make. 

So, it doesn’t come to her as a surprise when she climbs the stairs, mounting each one slowly but successfully, with a little bit of drifting in between, she reaches the top to see a young man standing near the bow of the boat with a constant breeze in his face. He’s quite a sight to her—pale and bright, richly brown hair burnished to an intriguing almost-glowing black in the vivid flood of moonlight and starlight. He stands near, but not in, a wan rotating puddle of light cast by a swaying oil lantern. 

She takes a step towards him, and a black raven alights onboard, and then Morrigan is standing behind her. “Good evening,” the expected greeting comes.

“Hello.” Not swift to turn around, she is trying to preserve some shreds of her current wellness. Sudden shifting and turning would rip the fragile strips apart quicker than the turbulent surf the ship is cutting through. “It’s good to see you.”

“And it’s good to see you finally managing to find your sea legs.”

Althea swallows, the edge of her throat burns a little bit less than it has for days. Morrigan’s comment isn’t particularly original; neither is it particularly welcome. It certainly isn’t inspiring any kind of humour in her. Nor is it enough to whip up her pique into something sharp enough to deliver a clever, nimble sort of retort—the kind for which she used to be known among close friends, responses just astute enough to not seem like a facetious self-defense against criticism and reproach. “How have you been enjoying the view?” she says.

Laughing just a moment, Morrigan looks past Althea to Kieran behind her. “It’s had its low points. But, as far as I can tell, no-one is following us.”

“Were you expecting someone to?”

“No, but you can never be too careful, can you? Expect the unexpected. Even if your former spymaster is a powerful woman still on your side,” Morrigan says, and Althea supposes Morrigan might know what she’s talking about, from experience. Avoiding her mother for as long as she did is not an insignificant feat. And she’s known Leliana longer than her, she should know even more how much the Divine is capable of. 

Being cautious as possible, it’s not about trust, it’s about doing everything within your purview to ensure your own success and survival. “You have a point,” Althea says. “Thank you, Morrigan, for your diligence.”

“You’re welcome. Speaking of which, would you mind doing me a favour?”

Her stomach gives a nauseous burble, but she quells her nerves with a self-critical shiver. Hands held closely to her body, the motion of the ship siphons through her and is dismissed by her resolve to be responsible. This is an effort in return for the mindful help given to her without her directly asking for it. “What can I help you with?”

“Could you watch over Kieran and see him to bed? I’ll be back in a bit. I trust you to take good care of him.”

“Of course. Though, he is old enough to take care of himself, don’t you think?”

Turning away, Morrigan allows Althea only a glance of the look that has rearranged her face. The tight pull of her smirk has loosened into something less definite, less amused, infinitely less satisfied. “That’s not the point. He will never be too old to be looked after.” Then, she sinks and shadows shift and the raven is back again. It circles overhead until Althea manages her way over to where the boy—who will soon be closer to fifteen than ten—is peering upwards at the two Antivan men who are up in the rigging also on the lookout for threats and possible danger. 

Kieran, who does not look to her immediately, is someone who, for whatever else may or may not befall him, is lucky to have known a mother’s love. And unconditional love at that. For that all that has befallen her, it’s impossible for her to understand what it must be like. And not because of her magic, her misfortune runs deeper than that. Chance didn’t give her a parent who was interested in her children beyond the fulfillment of a believed sacred duty. Her mother didn’t wish to be involved in their lives, not until they could achieve things that could potentially make her proud. 

Even Morrigan, bitter, hateful daughter who has vowed to be the mother hers wasn’t—she at least has enough of a relationship to be disappointed by the woman who gave her life. 

“Did you see it?” comes Kieran’s voice, sweet and endearing, still yet to break. He is pointing to the east at a wildly light-dense section of the sky. In it there is hardly any black to be seen.  “There was a falling star.”

“No, I missed it.”

“Aww. The next one, then,” he says, and looks at the horizon. The optimism of him vaguely makes her ache. Silence is what she would prefer, but she doesn’t mind it when he speaks to her again. “Can I see your hand?”

Or, she wouldn’t have minded. Had it been anything but this. Suddenly her sickness is back, welling up, getting ready to issue forth from her mouth. Saliva is already beginning to pool beneath her dry tongue. “Mother told me not to ask about it, but I heard you saved the world with it.”

“That makes me sound impressive, sure, but I’m not as impressive as you. Your grandmother is—well.”

His grandmother is a woman of legend. The one he knows of, she is the woman of legends in the Ages both recent and ancient, in mythic times when the power that is her was strong enough to reign in the world before becoming the betrayed victim of an epoch-ending murder. She also removed from him a spark of the soul of a being eldritch and terrible as she herself has been maligned to be. She freed him from his malicious, nefarious, chaotic dreams.

As for his paternal grandmother, she’s also quite a woman. An elf who loved a human king, she, out of all recorded history, is the one person who has ever been cured of the taint. Beyond being the sole survivor of inflictedBlight she is a mage of remarkable talent and influence. She is the mage who harnessed the discontent of her fellow magi Thedas-over and personally stoked the bellows of their rebellion, and so shaped a future that allowed space for their survival. All of this was accomplished before the marked mate of the Dread Wolf personally decided her son was to be left in the Fade to face the demon Nightmare. 

Unable to process all of this coinciding in one family tree, Althea looks past the same horizon to anything that could possibly lie beyond. Happening to see a single stray piece of detritus fall somewhere to Thedas seems a mundane occurrence compared to such coincidence coalesced into the living, breathing, flourishing human being standing next to her. Recently he’s started on a growth spurt—he will soon be taller than her tallest height boosted by boots. 

“She’s what?” he asks her.

“Well, you know. I was there when you met her.”

“Me and mother haven’t seen her since then. She’s missed three of my birthdays.”

“Then perhaps she’s doing something important. I’m sure you’ll see her again someday soon.”

“Maybe,” he says, and he still has enough of his childhood preserved in him that he cannot easily conceal his thoughts, feelings, or fears. The longing for a relationship with family no matter what other members of it may say, the unease that comes with thinking he might disappoint his mother because of it, both these things warp his words and make it hard for him to keep speaking. Feigned nonchalance cannot cloak the emotional churn he wishes he could hide, since he can’t easily smooth it out when he wants to, he has now only the start of a teenager’s tenuous grasp on himself.

She could ask what he thinks may happen. She could indulge her curiosity in a child’s speculation about his ancient deity of a grandmother. She could try to confirm her suspicion that this absence is somehow connected to Morrigan’s return to what was once the Inquisition.

But, after several seconds to consider it, what is the correct response is clear to her. A promise not explicitly made is still one she wants to keep. And, after all, his mother is counting on her to take care of him, even if she knows what her choice did to the father of her child, the man whom she hadn’t befriended, but whom she had come to respect before it completely stopped making a difference.

“Hey, you know what? I bet you can’t cast a bigger lightning bolt than me.” Whatever makes this hard for her, whatever unbearable weight of the unpayable debt she owes him drags her soul downwards towards dark, lonely places, she knows what she can do for him. 

As his mother said: he’s a normal child. She can give him a chance to be himself. Which is something she also lacked in her childhood before the Circle defined her as a mage dependent on the Maker’s too-good grace. It’s something else which even in Inquisition, at the height of her influence, was simply beyond her. She needed to be somebody for everyone. 

Recently she’s been no-one. Eventually, maybe, possibly before she dies, she might find a way to make that stop. 

“I’d rather try with fireballs,” Kieran says to her with an outstretched hand. An orange glimmer appears at the very tip of his finger and vibrates with the promise of thriving. “I bet I could beat you.”

“As long as you don’t catch the ship on fire,” she tells him. As the adult in this situation she has to be mindful one. It’s her responsibility to make sure things don’t get out hand well before the possibility that they can occurs. And yet, the fingers of her right hand are numb with cold and stasis. Shifting her hand from its place on the railing she’s left it on, the only sensation is a flurry of icy flecks displaced by the movement. Her skin could use some warming. And it still is some kind of a release, even if it isn’t the cool violet shock of plasma vaulting through the sky.

Grinning at her, he counters, “As long as _you_ don’t set it on fire.”

“Ah, well we’ll see about that. Whoever throws it farther wins.” The competition is on. She steps back, shakes her hands, nudges her mana to start flowing again. In this brief pause something occurs to her. It’s frivolous, and she knows it’s not really as amusing as she thinks it is, and his mother is in possession of a superior wit, but he is still young, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he can find the mere sound of things funny. “You know what this kind of ship is called? It’s a frigate. It’s a really fun word to say.”

He does laugh. It’s bright and loud and sounds to her wonderful. Several times he repeats the word to himself. 

“All right,” she says, now ready to begin. The start of a fire gleams in both of their hands. “Three, two, one—”

 

**.**

 

Morrigan is surprised to find her still awake. For all her knowledge, the wisdom of priests come down the Ages she has consumed, her cunning and keen cleverness too, she mistakes Althea’s fear of sleep as vigilance. But she is not wrong thinking that she’s benefitting from it.

“Was he much trouble?”

“You know he wasn’t,” she says lightly as her consciousness—settled as it was with her mind allowed to drift with the rocking of the vessel conveying her body—ripples in response to her movement. With her arm she adjusts herself so that she is facing mother and son. 

“Yes,” Morrigan says with a hushed voice, laughing quietly to herself. She lays her hand on her son’s forehead, mumbles something to cast a spell, and then gets ready to lay down in the hammock above him. The ship gently sways through all of this. There’s no way to know how tired the other woman may be.

She shifts again. A thought from earlier, related to an insight she thought she might have been onto, which she couldn’t confirm, reoccurs to her. This time it’s this—she still doesn’t know what this woman wants. “Why are you here, Morrigan?”

“I’m sorry?”

Exhaustion laces through her, interlocking underneath her skin with a tightening weave pulled tauter by her attempts to raise herself up. Supported by one trembling arm she pulls up to see the woman whom she is speaking to directly. The ice-bright hollowness opens up in the pit of her, slowly expanding, until she is suspended within the emptiness of air with only something flimsy as a hastily made hammock to keep her from tumbling down. “What is it that you want? Why do you need to find Mythal?”

Morrigan does not turn to face her. Her head remains settled against her arms where she placed it, with her eyes closed. Otherwise, she’s seeing the opposite darkened wall. “It’s better that you don’t know.”

“Do you always need to be so mysterious?” Having whispered until this point, these last words of hers escape as a pressed, pointed mumble that’s still heard all the same by the one it’s meant for thanks to the magic also muffling their voices. 

“Don’t be absurd. You wouldn’t understand if I were to tell you. I don’t think it’s possible to explain to anyone who hasn’t been granted what I have.” The other woman shifts in the dark unseen. In the same darkness Althea feels small and weightless—she may as well be a single flake of snow for all the lasting substance she has. Partially this is a sensation engendered by an awareness of how she’s being treated. Like a lesser, who may as well be a supplicant appealing to a goddess ascendant. Or, a child who cannot comprehend something, asking her mother repeatedly anyway out of a misguided attempt to try to tame her irrepressible fear of the unknown, of the change which is causing this disruption and uncertainty. As if she were seeking some sort of comfort this woman could actually give her. 

Really, she doesn’t care that Morrigan is the one who drank from the well, she insists to herself. She made her choice and there’s no point in regretting it. She shouldn’t resent someone for something she isn’t even sure is real, or possible—even if there is a chance she’s missing out on what could be a clue crucial to understanding what still doesn’t make sense to her so many months later. If the well could have granted her insight now, then it’s information she didn’t have the foresight to secure beforehand. There are other ways she’ll have to learn what she needs. And if Morrigan is indeed working with them then already she would have shared anything she might have been able to about the plots and plans of the former Inquisitor’s errant lover. Trust is not something strongly felt between the two women, but there is respect.

Or, at least, she thought there was. Respect and admiration for another woman who had also seen and learnt much to better know the world and the way that it should be.

Now all Morrigan has for her is one last brief thing to say. “Go to sleep, Althea.”

Unmoored and aimless, all she has to reply with is this: you could have just said she’s your mother and it’s complicated. There’s no need for haughtiness regarding fraught familial relations. Including ones of this strange, complex calibre. It has all already been seen by someone else at some point. Who is she to think she’s so different?

 

**.**

 

She waits until her conversation won’t come as a disturbance to him. This is for his sake and her sake. She hopes he’ll make the rest of the voyage without needing to be roused from his enviable peace. 

Two days away from Ostwick, when they have lost sight of the last purple-black lump of land to the port side them and made it out onto the truly open sea, she doesn’t get what she hopes for. But she does get what she’s been waiting for. A freak but brief storm startles him out his self-determined peace-of-mind. He is forced to scramble above deck into chill air and cold daylight, where the rocking of the ship feels less pronounced, where the tranquility leaves him as readily as the contents of his stomach evacuate his body. 

She is above taking in the sun, so she sees him hunching over the side of the boat. Both to make sure she stays awake and stay somewhat unstiffened, the exercise was meant to be useful to her. Now, the opportunity for it to be even more so is presented. She has been thinking about what the elvhen man said to her last time, and been wanting to ask why it seemed he was going to say his people were just as bad as modern ones. It wasn’t personal, not really, maybe he’s just made that miserable by the memories he has of his own people. Maybe moving about the modern world hasn’t yet mitigated memories of capricious cruelty with tinges of murky nostalgia. Such memories, disfigured as they may be, are a possibility which pique her. It’s possible he’s the one person alive best able to describe to her the background lurking so luridly in her lover’s unknowable mind.

More than that, he is a person whom she wants to converse with. Insistence on simply seeing his and others’ duty done—and ensuring the safety of his remaining Sentinels—is not enough to dissuade her interest in getting to know him. The fact remains that he’s a living, thinking, vomiting vestige of a world thought lost, which its destroyer is trying to save at the cost of her own. And he’s not aiding the one who would restore the recondite things he knows used to be. There must be a reason why.

After giving him some time to himself, she approaches him. The sharp sound the solid heels her fine boots make should be enough to alert him. Still, she stops several steps away to say something before going over to stand on either of his open sides. 

“Would you like me to get you some water?”

Clinging to the carved rail as if he needs its support to keep standing he does not turn to face her. 

“Maybe in a bit, then.”

“I’ll let you know when I can handle it,” he says. Exasperation which cannot be presented in his current slack body language is expressed clear enough to her by his tone. 

“When you’re not resembling the Fade?”

“What?”

“You know, sick. Turning green.”

Grunting, Abelas finally turns to face her. He regards her for the span of several sharp blinks. “I’m not green.”

Althea laughs. This surprises the both of them. 

“Not, you’re literally not. It’s just an expression.”

“It’s a bad one,” he says simply, and then goes back to looking out towards where there is nothing to be seen. Only blank blue sky and hassled grey water and the misty line where they supposedly never meet. All of it indefinite and uncommitted as a dream.

“Abelas?”

“What?”

“May I ask something of you?”

She doesn’t need to see his face to know that he has at least one eyebrow quirked and putting lines in his pallid, ageless skin. He asks her to clarify. Which she should have expected, from someone typically prone to restive gestures. “Beyond your asking if you can ask?” 

“Yes.”

“Yes,” he says, too, swaying, still not looking at her. He also adds—giving to her a sign of sincere engagement in their exchange that touches her—after that, “Go ahead.”

“Will you teach me your language?” she ventures as she takes several steps to stand near his left side. Over the course of a pause which she allows, she watches the horizon remain static and unmoved. Through the water they cut and progress, leaving behind them a white wake that is quickly consumed by the churn all around it. Though the man beside her is susceptible to seasickness, she cannot forget how strange he is by human standards. These same standards make her extraordinary, but, compared to that, he’s more or less singled out as something beyond singular—he lacks their intrinsic limit that even they themselves define humans by. The vastness of his lifespan makes the living mass of them look like unfortunates who pass away before the end of their infancy. “l don’t know if I can ever be fluent in it,” Althea continues, “but I want to learn more. I want to be able to have a conversation in it.”

“I’m not that kind of a teacher. I’m not the best person to teach you.”

“No, but you’re the right one” she says, and here is where she finally reaches out to him. Gently, with every effort to not be invasive, she brushes her right hand on his shoulder to make her point emphatic. He may not be the best, he may have just been a soldier, but he is here. “I don’t exactly have all that many options right now anyway.”

Apparently interested in the reason why she touched him, he turns just enough to angle his harsh features towards her now. The tilt of his head is one of curiosity—it has been a long time since anyone sought physical contact that wasn’t intended to harm him. Though mild his intrigue is present. “Have you tried asking a spirit to help you?”

A genuine question she does not feel comfortable answering. Nor is she comfortable avoiding it. So a gap opens up between them in which the only thing that happens is that they stare at each other. There are things on her mind much too heavy too juggle. Without recourse to deftly handling them, the best she can do is distract.

“I’m not that good at dreaming on my own.” What she’s unable to avoid admitting is this: without help she is not as capable as she was. She cannot do what she once could, she cannot with ease visit and communicate with any of the beings trapped beyond the Veil. Without the excessive access allowed to her by the special relationship she’s lost, she’s only as effective now as any other human gifted with a certain connection to the Fade.

“All right,” Abelas says. Gingerly, he nods. He moves to take his weight off his elbows and stands up, taller than her by an imposing amount. At his full height she cannot see over his shoulder unless she gets up off her heels and soles. “In return, I ask that you spar with me each day. If you want to fight like an arcane warrior, you should learn how to fight like one. Then maybe I can keep in practise too.”

So, he remembers that about her. That’s something. “I can’t wait to learn. I’ll be the strongest shemlen around.” Thinking that’s the end of it, she puts her hand on her hip and strikes something like a pose, or some kind of posture with a purpose. The grin comes to her too, fake as the pride she’s trying to display in their amicable negotiation. 

His voice, which is always stretched higher than what she expects from a man of his size by the strict way he bears himself, is thin, serious, and sharp now. If it were to break it would cut. “Don’t call yourself that.”

She would ask him why, what exactly does he mean by this comment that comes from him as a surprise she doesn’t know if she should be grateful for or not, given that it could be kindness, or it could be a linguistic point he wants to make already, but he suddenly doubles over and that’s the end of the conversation for now. Putting a pin in it she reaches out to him and soothes him with silence and a sudden stream of soft magic. This outpouring from her comes only with care for making him well enough to be able to rest. She doesn’t expect anything but that to come from it.

 

**.**

 

Told she has two days while they’re here in port to unload and load cargo, Althea disembarks the moment she can. Once again buried in borrowed clothes, she steps onto the docks. For these first steps on ground in two weeks the world won’t stop moving underneath her motionless feet. The oily leathers sag even more from her body, indicating to her it’s true what she’s wondered about. She’s managed to become even less substantial over the short course of this journey; her breasts no longer offer any resistance to their quashing. Her skin and her hair feel rough from the accumulated damage they’ve endured from cold buffeting saline winds. 

Here the air is warmer and heavier, but gentler, as if summer has cooled and calmed down and seriously considered turning to a mild, sensible autumn. And the wind off the open sea keeps the humidity reasonable. 

She is not on land one hour before someone asks what she knows must come. Kieran, who’s walking with her among merchants’ stalls and mistaken by hawkers as either his peer or brother, he asks her, “Aren’t you from here?”

What she wants to say is no. The loud crowds of Free Marchers, the smells of local food, the old cobbles grimy under her feet, the skyline brimming and bustling with spires she should recognise but doesn’t without the tower—none of this is anything but foreign to her. None of this is reminiscent to her as a part of her childhood. Honest to herself the Orlesian court had more in common with what she recalls of it. “Yes,” she says. “Though we didn’t spend much time in the city. We didn’t have a townhouse. The estate of my family is farther to the north, closer to their holdings.”

Not our, never that, but their, because the Chantry saw to it decades ago. She was dispossessed of her noble privileges long before her family got around to finally disowning her. 

As if he is still too young to understand the notion of what most families are—fraught despite the simple and natural nature of the direct relationship of who is what to whom—Kieran gives her a look that expresses a lack of understanding more eloquently than he could. Whether it’s innocence or his lack of meaningful relationships outside of his own special familial circumstances, it’s hard to say. But either way she’s not keen on having to explain it for him. Describing her past seems like a monumental effort that will yield little, if any, reward. The best she can hope for is garnered sympathy from a twelve year old. Not something she particularly wants. Certainly doesn’t need. 

“I’m sure I’ll see them when we come this way again. They’re so busy, I can’t just show up unannounced.”

“Mother says we’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Well, I don’t mind missing them a longer if it makes their life a little bit better.”

This he really doesn’t understand either. And yet he knows something is not right, his head is tilted and his eyes are slightly closed by the strain of stress. He’s trying to work out what he senses is wrong even without the context common to everyone else. “But don’t they miss you too?” 

“Sometimes, when we miss someone, the best thing for everyone is stay away longer. If there’s something we need to do, for example, we should finish that before we return to them. What if they suffered because we selfishly wanted to see them? Hurting them like that would be awful.”

“But what if you never see them again?” he asks her. Though mortality has touched his life a handful of times, much of him still struggles with this inconceivable idea. Like most humans he doesn’t yet accept death for what it is, the end that it constitutes. No more chances or obligations, once that door is shut it is closed for good—lost opportunities no longer matter when there is no consciousness left to care. It’s like asking the earth to weep to worry about anything that might come after. Because nothing will come of that effort. 

“Well,” she begins, for him, whom she cares enough for to not see caught up in an unending, unsolvable spiral of thoughts monstrous to so young and malleable a mind. “that’s why you should say goodbye before leaving someone.”

But it is also a quick mind he possesses. “Did you say goodbye?”

She does not have an answer for that. 

To buy herself some time, she stops and purchases for Kieran a snack of roasted chestnuts from a vendor who evidently thinks they are both healthy young boys who are growing, and surely they both could use a bag of nuts to help them get big and strong. She says no thank you, and that’s it, she presses a hand into Kieran’s back and urges him along.

Still, she doesn’t have an answer. Until now it hadn’t mattered. Now, there are stakes, with his interest in her life coming to bear some influence upon it. The way he looks at her reminds her of what she used to know: the consequences of all her actions, past and present and yet to be taken, they affect someone.

He tells her, “Maybe you should.”

And maybe she should. Just in case. It shouldn’t matter in this case that she still regrets refusing to say goodbye when she was too busy trying to accept that this was it, after this kiss, he really was going to leave her here, alone. Someone else would have to carry her limp form to safety.

 

**.**

 

An hour later with Abelas as company, Althea finds her way to the north-winding road that will lead her to the place where she was born. Still in disguise she is sure she will not be recognised if someone who knew her happens to see her. And with the elvhen man along, most people who see the sight of them find him to be the much more interesting of the pair. The Dalish are not common here and nor are ordinary elves—evidently they must be rarer these days than she remembers. This isn’t the Circle, after all.

But by the way they stare at him with a frigid edge to their cutting gazes, it strikes her that their roused fear and discomfort and maybe even awe seem personal, specifically of him. They figure he must want something from them, if he’s not disappeared with the rest of his assumed kind. The tension among races is worse here in the Free Marches than in Ferelden. There at least what seemed like a majority of elves had not disappeared in the looming twilight of the world. She can’t help but wonder, does that mean their doom might somehow be closer here?

But eventually the open staring he gets from two or more people at a time stops. They get farther out from the city, three miles becomes four miles, almost the neat five they will be travelling. Fewer people are out here. Most passersby are either on horses or on business that keep their looks from lingering. 

As they come up upon mile five, the late afternoon sun spills out from behind the clouds that unravel around it. A quiet breeze ruffles the colourful trees they pass. Cows low in their golden pastures tucked between the round hills. Like the heads of sleeping children they are peaceful and still and a pleasant sight to see. Out of everything she recalls her childhood consisting of, these vistas come the closest to kindling nostalgia. This landscape is gentle as a nurturing touch. 

Abelas has been content to walk beside her most of the way in silence. Now, despite the settled peace of the moment, he looks to her. Her slow pace has halted to meandering. “Are you all right?”

Already quickening, she doesn’t turn to him, she shakes her head out of her sudden need to apologise for what feels to her like a blatant lack value set upon his time. It is nice of him to come with her—she should keep that in mind and not draw this out longer than it should take her. Doing so only wastes time for him. It doesn’t matter that he seemingly has a surplus of it. “I’m fine. I was just thinking about something.”

“Do we need to stop?”

“No,” she says. “Let’s keep going. I want to get back before nightfall.”

He nods. As someone who has volunteered to see her where she needs to go as the need arises, this is a good plan in his estimation. So they continue onwards at a pace set by her that’s deliberately faster than before.

Then, they pass between hills into an artificially dense woods. In the tunnel of trees a stone wall to their left rears up, stolid and stout for all its suddenness. Less than a hundred steps later they are at a forbidding gateway, behind which the cleared out lands rich with grass are visible in peeks behind the veil of trees long ago planted to keep private matters away from the eyes of peasants. Somewhere among their number is a venerable oak believed to be as old as the Chantry. A well-kept gravel driveway twists away towards the house they cannot see. There are many things separating them from the individuals who dwell on this land. 

They are not, she is not, welcome here. 

Which is for the best because, the longer she stands here, the more her certainty eclipses her anxiety. She is not going to be seeing her birthplace. It’s been a waste of his time after all but there’s nothing she can do, no way to change it, she’ll just have to make it up to him another way. She knows the next time she takes a step, it will be away from this place. The one hand of hers ends up placed against the orange, white, brown marble pillar that serves as one of the posts of the gate. Aged, smooth, free of moss and mold, upon which a proud mare is perched, this is where she’ll leave her mark. A handprint, as fleeting or meaningful as anything she’s ever meant to her family. 

Besides her, Abelas has his gaze on her. But he does not question what he’s seeing. He just observes her. Any objections or censorious rebuke will come later. In this moment they are quiet together. 

And, in the next, someone else is passing by. 

Althea turns around. Behind her is a hearsecart piled with a heap of corpses that chill her. The sight, that’s not it—it’s the sense that they give her. Humming, thrumming, traces of the Fade waft about them like a clinging cloying scent. She has felt this upon others twice before in her lifetime: in the aftermath of ritualistic immersion into the Fade itself, and when people got too close to rifts in encounters they rarely survived. Which these people evidently hadn’t. 

But, it doesn’t seem possible that there could be a rift here to cause these cadavers. Right here, close to where others consider her home? There’s only been a report of one or two opening in the Free Marches. And surely someone sharing her blood would have mentioned it when writing to her to ask to exploit the circumstances chance had bestowed upon her. Though, if she’s honest, when has she ever known anything about what’s really going on? Or even about the things she’s actually aware of?

She looks to Abelas. He has his full attention upon the stranger and his load of Fade-touched flesh. Already he is getting ready to speak and inquire about intentions, to gather information. “You there,” he says.

“Hail,” says the stranger, a human man nearing middle age. His eyes and hair are both browner than the leather of his faded vest. “Have you business with the Trevelyans? The side entrance is farther down the road.” He stares at Abelas—he points to indicate the way, as his eyes plainly trace the lines of the elf’s vallaslin. “You should try down there.”

“Those bodies,” Althea says, stepping forward. “What happened them?”

Both men turn to her. She realises now, she should have been more thoughtful. There’s no hiding now they are not from around here, she’s opened them up to be the subject of all sorts of speculation with her showing of curiosity. 

“We’re passing through. So, if there’s danger...we may need help to avoid it.”

“The rift is what happened. The damned thing has been open for three weeks now. No-one knows how to go about closing it. Without our mages or templars or that blasted Inquisition, we have to wait for the Chantry to do something.”

To not betray anything else, Althea just nods. 

But, she cannot help herself. In the end, the inertia of habit is stronger than a lot of things. “Maybe we can help. We can get rid of the demons already come through into our world.”

“What are you two? Mercenaries? Hedge mages?” he asks of them. As he names these things, the first signs of belligerence manifest in the way he’s regarding them. One hand tightens into a fist. One foot angles the brunt of his considerable weight in their direction.

“We’re just passing through,” she says, calm to try and reassure him, but it does not escape her notice that Abelas has been moving forwards. He could intercede between her and the man if it comes to that, though she really has no fear of what this man might do to her. No matter what he can manage it’s nothing compared to what she endured.

“Drifters, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“Then you should get moving on your way. The Bann is a respectable man who’ll have nothing to do with the likes of you. And we can take care of our own. We don’t need any foreign knife-ears getting involved and making our problems worse.” 

Really, she wonders, is that the best he has for her, whose many sins against the world don’t include a flowing drop of elvhen blood, and him, who knows without a whiff of doubt he’s superior in every way to what this shelmen accuses him of being? There are so many things that could serve this man as better insults. But, lest she instigate something more, she is aware enough now to keep these thoughts to herself. This encounter has been made uncomfortable enough. And Abelas, he doesn’t have a staff, but that doesn’t make him any less deadly. His feet are planted and he’s ready to do what he has said he would.

Remaining quiet, Althea puts a hand on his elbow in a meaningful touch. Not unnoticeably he flinches beneath her. She doesn’t want this for him. Or of him.

Spitting into the dust the Free Marcher decisively continues on his way. His conviction is proudly reinforced by his resolve to be independent and self-sufficient. Turning down the shady aid offered him has reminded him he can be capable, if he chooses to be. The feet of his gruesome load are left uncovered by the dirty cloth laid over them, and they bounce when he passes over a rut before disappearing from view.

Left behind Althea and Abelas still are in front of the entrance to the Trevelyan estate. After a brief silence, she says to him, “let’s get back. We can figure out what to do from there.”

“We’ll see,” Abelas says. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I intended to get one of these up a week but it might be a bit longer than that due to some over-use issues I've developed with my hands.


	4. iv.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After gathering some crucial information, she learns something about Abelas. He is not someone she would have thought to have any stock in fated things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ayyy, so. I didn't mean for this to take more than a month to get up, but, well, here we are. I started a new job so that took me out for a few weeks as I had to adjust to a completely new schedule. Beyond that, I have ended up with a shorter chapter than I might have wanted to have at the start, but I think it's now a good balance. The next one shouldn't take me as long as I have a skeleton for it already.
> 
> On a side note! If anyone would like to chat or play some Dragon Age multiplayer (I'm working towards soloing Heartbreaker content), my Origin account is Astrid_Ashdown. At the moment I do not have a tumblr or twitter active but, if there's interest, I'll look into getting one of them up again! Anyway, as always, I hope you enjoy.

Upon the setting of the reddened sun, Althea and Abelas are back within the city proper. Her steps are shuffling across the paved roads, the pale stones crept upon by escalating shadow, her arm and her head are kept low and out of general sight. What she knows she might see otherwise, if only she were to look up at, to the sight of a dazzling, unclouded, bleeding twilight, does not entice her. There are other things which compel her to keep herself down.

The suspicious looks of others are felt enough by her to know poignantly how unwelcomed she is by those who see her passing by them. Now that the merchants who would try to sell to anyone in open and cheerful daylight, even to her and to him, those benign charlatans have packed up and made way for the less proper people of the nocturnal crowd. There’s no-one left who has a reason to pretend that they the two of them are in any way wanted. Those who are out dealing and participating in the life of the world now have an interest in turning away business that promises either problems or less than desirable pay. 

Not to be disheartened, delayed, or destroyed by this treatment, what she really wants is to get back to the tavern where rooms have been rented and secured for the two nights they will be staying in Ostwick. The name of the place of the lodgings given was also told to her with the name of a street not far from the harbour’s docks. She doesn’t quite know where it is. Probably, it’s either partially a brothel, or not far from one, but she finds she’s not repulsed by this. Why should she have something against someone else having a good time? So long as they don’t bother her. The worst would be someone making her answer for her reserved judgment of them, something not likely to happen among people who know to mind their own matters.

Abelas, who has trailed behind her on the way back, is now staunchly at her side. Her left side is where he keeps pace. At her weaker side, the side which she too agrees needs some kind of compensation. Though others probably think he and she are more likely to be the aggressors in a confrontation, they aren’t exactly impervious to becoming targets. Aware of this he keeps watch on her, around them, and the direction in which they are headed. And she lets him do this for her. Once, as her eyes remain shut for an allowed moment, she lets him grab her firmly by her upper arm several seconds before a careless driver rushes his horses and carriage with its jilting cargo down a narrow street already tight with people and crowded overhangings. Upon opening them again, she watches the almost-danger clatter away into other people's’ lives, slinging curses at everyone.

“Thank you,” she says to him, even though she does not actually appreciate being handled so much like a load of flour or sugar or rope or anything else light and not hard to stuff into a sack, of being reminded so easily and potently of her uncommanding size. It has happened in her life, over a span of several months nightmarish months, that she could not convince herself she was not likely to be abducted again as in what had been an inexplicably freak occurrence. It is several long seconds before he lets her go. 

“You should be more careful.”

“And what? Keep my eyes open? Try and see into the future?”

“So you can see what’s going to happen in your current surroundings,” he counters. As he tends to do when he’s irritated or put-off by what she says, he looks at her without even shaking his head. “You could stand to be more aware.” And he’s not wrong, though she’d rather he not say it, not become momentarily a reminder of all the blame and responsibility she still thinks she should have been able to take.

“Yeah, no kidding. It’s not like you’re the only one in the world who thinks that of me.”

“Then why haven’t you listened to others’ concerns?”

“No-one has actually ever said it to me. Not like you have.”

Regarding her, looking obliquely at him, the steps they move forward in are progress made in silence. Now he shakes his head at her. He doesn’t seem to mind so much her being human — there are other things about her that test his patience plenty enough. To the point that it seems she’s capable of easily befuddling him if she’s not managed to vex him. “Just pay more attention. And get some actual sleep tonight. You look terrible.”

“Well, thanks for letting me know about that too. You really just say what you see.”

He’s learnt by now what a rhetorical question is, so he should understand that there are also rhetorical remarks that are sometimes made when someone wants the last word as a consolation for their loss in a debate, or conversation. Such things indicate that he has won and the issue can be over and considered thoroughly resolved. But that doesn’t stop him from frowning at her, and waving his hand before them in an obvious gesture. “If I’ve noticed it, anyone could have. You’re putting yourself at risk.”

So is sleeping, she thinks, and it’s not just herself in that case. What she does next, instead of trying to explain something she doesn’t particularly want to, is look fully away from him and take his advice. She looks at what’s around her: fewer people than before, with faces harder to make out as more last light leaks out of the world and the shadows billow out to fill in what’s left behind. They’re in a part of the city she doesn’t recognise immediately, but the plaintive cries of gulls are getting louder and louder. Paying attention, she gathers enough parsable details to guess they are less than many blocks away from the destination. Soon she can slump into a rickety chair and give her dissenting legs a rest. Most of her is over this failed attempt to have some kind of meaningful interaction with her past. It’s more than just physically behind her.

Still, Abelas is diligent in his set duty. He has kept her safe through this prolonged, pointless jaunt. He has been ready to defend her from anything and anyone including herself. Now he is beside her making sure that she gets through to the end of this: back to safety, to the tavern, probably to get at least a little bit tipsy, before getting to rest. He has not wavered even if he has not been uncritical or non-judgmental or blind to her choices and actions. He expects — practically demands — common sense from her. He should be an example to her. 

He is, after all, a man whom she admires. The force of his devotion and resolve is a wonder to her. Maybe not the most miraculous thing about him, or that could have have come from his age, as this feels to her more like a trait of his, something from his unique character, than anything culturally cultivated. That is, his ability to remain constant, in today’s world, and in a world that was a literal dreamland animated by fancies and whims — how could she not be in awe of someone like him? If he ever loses patience, she understands. It’s never been for a capricious reason. 

So here she is. Walking with another elvhen man who has his kept reasons for being at her side. She will continue to learn more about them the best she can, so that she can protect herself. It doesn’t matter what he says or intends or means to do, or even what he actually does. This is just a practical matter Abelas himself would probably agree with — there’s always the possibility of something inexplicable happening with one of their race, these ancient elves, of whom so little is truly known and understood. Just like a human, who they think they are above and unlike, they have about them the inelcutable truth of a secret, inner life of self. There is never any way to know for sure that you actually know who they really are. There are too many complexities and questions and too much that is recondite about them to make it possible.

Seeing her turn her attention back to him, Abelas inclines his head towards her, briefly, before turning forward again. She waits until he has done so to engage him. “Do you ever miss her, Abelas?”

He does not turn to her again. But he knows of whom she speaks. “You cannot know. No-one who could know is no longer left. Those who could appreciate what we lost with her murder are long since departed, or lost themselves.”

Having listened to his explanation, something within her is roused. It is not pity, it is not sympathy, is not quite empathy. He has said she couldn’t understand it — nor could anyone. There isn’t anyone. So, here among old cramped human- and elf-built buildings, close to the darkening sea, she has to ask about what’s to come, she has to ask of him, “Is that why you don’t mind? Because, no matter what, there’s no way to restore what once was?”

“I think,” he sincerely says, “you’re tired. Or have already forgotten what I told you before we left?” He is quiet after that, satisfied with what he has said, expecting now a response to come after her silence. He does not mind waiting. There is a stretch of time in which they do nothing but continue walking. 

Finally, his equable expectation becomes unbearable to her. She relents, she shakes her head, she says, “You’re right. Let’s hurry, then.”

“We’re already here.”

And there they stand before an old worn building, with warm lights within its clouded windows.

 

**.**

 

Picking at hints of hangnails around her ungloved hand, Althea defers from facing one of the many anxieties that have infested her. She turns to Morrigan and ignores the feeling that she is being watched from across the room. This particular paranoia won’t distract her tonight. “So, some man you almost brawled with told you there’s a rift nearby, and you believe him?”

“Yes. I don’t see a reason not to,” Althea answers, running her right hand across her hair, though not through it, like she’s been longing to all day. In her mind, the length of it hangs freely down her head, along her shoulders in sheathes, and it falls in front of her, where she has already combed through it with itching, anxious fingers. Such a pleasant release this would be — if she could allow herself to drop the illusion of her boyish disguise. This has not been an easy day, nor an easy conversation. Not that she had thought convincing Morrigan, of anything, would ever be so. “So I think tomorrow, I should go and see what I might be able to do about it.”

“And what about us?” Morrigan asks. She finishes the last morsel of the meal she had ordered an hour or so ago. Since Althea has refused it several times now, she evidently doesn’t want the remainder of the meat to go waste. 

She sighs, now facing the resistance she had expected. Lowering her head she looks to the expectedly dirty floor of the tavern. Sees the expectedly drab sight of her worn boots upon the old, poorly attended stains of wine and beer on flagstone, sees nothing that would be new to a weary traveller. Her body is sore for having only walked a handful of mostly flat miles. The stiffness pulling at the base of her neck and the sting of her wilted shoulders are both not explained by what little she’s actually done in the course of the day. 

“What about you?” Althea asks with her head still too heavy to be lifted. 

“What exactly are you expecting us to do? Not go with you?”

That, as a response, is something she hadn’t been expecting. Interest from Morrigan wasn’t what she anticipated — after all the woman has been so beholden to her own esoteric mission and furtive goals lately, and she always has been open about her affinity for the arcane and its attendant things usually only vaguely understood. Althea also remembers vividly what the other woman said to her in the dark, quiet hold of a ship in a deeper part of the night. That memory is still rimmed with feelings hard to decipher and reconcile no matter the simplicity of the intended message meant to be taken away.

Finally, she looks up at the older woman. Who is looking across their table at her with a tilted chin and innate haughtiness tightening the skin around her red-lined eyes. Because of the dim, cost-efficient lighting Althea is able to detect the first impressions of wrinkles around Morrigan’s lucidly golden eyes. 

“You want to come and help?”

“Why don’t you try asking me? You might just find out if I want to.”

There is half-full tankard of weak stout on the table before her. Althea lies one hand on its handle, shifts it around, and then folds her hands in her lap. The bend in her neck is something she knows would be considered poor posture, but it’s hard to keep her head upright, if her elbows aren’t on something so her hands can be stable enough to support it. “Would you be interested in investigating this rift with me, and helping the people of Ostwick?”

“If it can be done.”

“That’s — ”

Morrigan waves a hand at her to cut her off definitely as she is not yet done herself. She continues quickly, as if sure that Althea will yield, “You’re going to need better information than what you have already.”

“Could you give me that?”

Through the use of the Well, is what she’s implying. Morrigan catches her meaning and appears to scoff at such an inane, childish miscomprehension of what she is capable of thanks to the voices in her head. After laughing she says, “No, of course not. You’ll have to do that work yourself if you want to go off on this little side mission.”

“Have you not spoken with an Inquisition contact yet?” The question, and its helpful suggestion, comes from behind her. Before Althea can turn to look over her shoulder to see him standing out from the drunken, generally loose crowd, Abelas has otherwise soundlessly come to occupy a seat at the table. With his hood drawn up and his head low too he could just be another tired traveller or worksman. Though, she’s been spending time enough with him to start to recognise the sights and signs of his tells — the slightly inward cocking of his elbow indicates he’s tense and ready to draw a weapon to him if need be. Which would be magic itself in this case, defensively or offensively, pulled effortlessly and beautifully from the Fade by his own hand, as he has left his staff upstairs in their rooms. 

Althea has watched him for a few seconds before she remembers that he had said something sensible to her as he sat down. Starting a bit, then heavy once more, she considers him and then Morrigan. The look those two give one another is brief, unsurprisingly so, bordering on curt, as if they were a Fereldan and Orlesian who had agreed they were perfectly fine not liking each other, as long as they neither one of them tried to start something with the other. She hadn’t been present for whatever conversation had precipitated this separate peace between them. It’s one more thing that, if she wants to know about it, she’ll have to ask and try to learn.

“Is there one in particular you mean?” she asks as she pushes towards him her drink.

Turning towards her, he shakes his head once, the heavy folds of his hood hardly tremble, and he places his hand on the table to decline her offer. The beverage is left in the space between them. Perhaps he’ll wait for someone to come by and take his own order of something darker and richer and more intoxicating. “Wouldn’t any one of them do?”

If she’s plain with herself, she can’t say one way or another if she knows for sure. It seems to her that he, with his silent soldier’s vigilance, and Morrigan, with her ancient whispering voices, both know more at any one of these present moments about what’s going on than she does. And it’s more realistic that way. Tapping her boot, which encases curled toes, on the grimy stone underfoot, she is reminded that she has said so herself — the Inquisitor’s adventuring days are over. That woman is retired, there is no reason for her to be here, there is no-one like her here any needs to report to. For a moment she considers this and what has happened up until now. 

“The captain, perhaps?” she ventures.

“Or one of the other two agents planted here,” Morrigan adds, as casual of a comment as she could make. 

Althea resists the urge to look at the other woman and instead remains focussed on Abelas, who does indeed end up ordering something harder and more sumptuous than her weaker beer. The wine could leave his lips stained something besides their usual pale bloodless shade of pink. 

“Whoever you choose to talk to would do,” he says to her. “But I would advise you do so quickly.”

“And you’re okay with coming along to help?”

He looks at her plainly, without reservation. Clearly, to her, without having doubted that he would end up having something to do with this the moment they first heard about the rift from the man encountered earlier today.

“You shouldn’t go alone. Whatever the case may be,” he says.

“I appreciate it. But maybe you might be able to do something where I cannot, with your magic.”

Once again he considers her, as if the sight of her could somehow be a part of his current calculations. Though what he might see beyond an uninspiring, unforthcoming, and irresolutely androgynous vagabond, is something she cannot picture. It’s unfathomable to her that, when he looks at her, he may still see traces of an afterimage of someone whom he had once come to respect on the merit of her measured and considered and inspiring actions. Walking the path of an earnest supplicant seeking justice was done in another life. 

“It’s just a theory I have at this point,” she begins, raising one hand and placing it once more on the handle of her drink. This time she grips at it to pull it back towards her. “But the magic you can do, as a true elvhen? Perhaps it might be able to mend the Veil.”

“Assuming the Veil does not simply repel any magic of its like,” Morrigan begins, from her side of the table. “As it is of elvhen magic, no? So it may be unaffected by such. But perhaps you are onto something. ‘Twould be something worth trying especially if we had more time. The knowledge could be useful for any number of other applications.”

“What are you suggesting?” Abelas asks her, now facing the human woman who is — upon the technicality of a binding compulsion older than he himself — the current head priestess of the being he is sworn too, and her daughter too. The blood writing on his face is almost as dark and poignant as the drink as he has ordered in such dingy, intimate, low-burning light. And the branches of the leafless tree splayed across his face twist briefly as he frowns in his observance of Mythal’s mortal daughter. 

“I am not suggesting anything, elf. I am merely pointing out something that should have been obvious. Honestly it’s an oversight that we hadn’t tested something like this before on the rifts that remained after the Breach was sealed.”

But at that time they had had the anchor — or the Inquisitor had, at any rate. And they still had had their Inquisitor. Now, unable to participate practically in this conversation, all Althea has are theories and ruminations that result from her experience and what parts of her education have managed to remain in-tact after so much has been dismantled, picked-apart, vivisected, and simply disproven by the truth of magic’s place in the world. 

“As far as we know, any attempts by...mortals to alter the Veil have always been either unsuccessful, done at unfathomable expense, and with catastrophic results. Or with magic that just wasn’t their own. However there aren’t really any records that might tell us what an elvhen still in full possession and control of his power might be able to accomplish. And if your magic allowed you to preserve your temple from time, and your life…”

She looks to Abelas, a man who is impossibly old. Vestige from a lost world, he is, capable of things she doubts she could ever guess at before being privileged to see them. He may not be a mage ascended to false godhood, but he is not unremarkable. Even among his own powerful kind, who had more magic than all the modern empires might be able to muster combined, easily accessible, readily available if a whim were to breeze through them, all they had to do was stretch their fingertips, so it was as a part of their life, vital to that life as the natural and unremarkable coursing of blood through veins. 

For a moment she feels the insistent thrum of her pulse in her temple. Thumping, thumping, beating against her thoughts, and she thinks of viscous red-black welling and filling up the grooves of the shoddy wooden table she traces with her thumbnail. Magic, she thinks, can said to be in the blood, as, once a family had a mage in it, that entire bloodline became suspect to the Chantry. That’s how it used to be. And might have been again, had she failed. But she hadn’t, not on this account, here she was a mage free to move about the world by her own will. 

Magic could also come from the blood, even the blood of those not able to do their own feats of magic, it didn’t matter if they were the source and sacrifice to perform magic done by a blood mage. It still would work. Maybe that’s why elven blood has always been favoured in Tevinter — something about it being stronger, magically speaking, purer, closer to the source, though it could also have to do with ease of access to their bodies, couldn’t it, she wonders, and then stops wondering, as a shiver passes through her and her jaw tightens to the point of pain. She then realises she is being looked at by the both of her companions. 

“Pardon?” she asks them.

“As I was saying, I will come with you to gather information. You are tired and should rest as soon as possible. Ideally, you would let me do this on my own,” Abelas says, not the least bit weary. He raises a hand before she can offer the apparently expected refusal of his help and effort. “It isn’t trouble to me. It is getting an accurate as possible assessment of possible risk.”

So it is, she can’t argue with that, something so rational and logical from a man who has as little tolerance for nonsense as he does. Resolute, decisive, he takes one last impressive swig of his wine — to finish it, surely, as he’s not one to waste — and clearly waits for her to stand up too. She does so when she can dismiss the unbearable weight of creeping exhaustion as something that she doesn’t presently have time for. Now there is another matter to attend to. Without finishing her beer she and Abelas make their way over to the loudest table in the tavern, where their captain sits like a flamboyant princling holding court. In attendance as his courtiers are crewmates and locals alike delighted with his company. For all this rapt attention already received he is quick to turn his attention to the two new dour faces. 

“And what can I do for my passengers this evening? Are you finally joining us? A good time to! I was just about to share my daring escape from a pampered nest of nugs in heat that were siced on me by a lover jealous of my fresh, budding courtship with a much younger, fairer thing,” he says, facing the two of them, but his eyes are on Althea by the time he’s finished. As if he knows Abelas is essentially following her — or perhaps it’s something else, for another reason he has on his mind, though she could not possibly account for what it might be. From his own telling of it she has nothing to offer that might be of interest to him. Ostensibly he’s acting as though he doesn’t know better than to assume the gender she’s intending to be mistaken as. 

Evenly, she goes with what she is presenting now, and keeps her tone a flat, ambiguous alto. Any lilt in her voice is inflected towards sarcasm, as if of what she speaks might be regarded by some as the subject of an unkind joke. “Five times on the way here was enough already, thank you. What we’re more interested in is the Inquisition. According to what I’ve heard, what remains of it might have a problem to take care of around here.”

Several heads turn their way but their captain remains smiling and amused and glittering with charisma. “Is that so, lad? What are you two, mercenaries looking for a clean-up job?”

“We’re just interested in what could be a good story. Perhaps you have a tale or two about the rift that has opened up outside the city? Maybe how a particularly shady shade has begun robbing ladies of their bloomers and selling them to less than proper gentlemen.”

For all the terror, fear, stress, chaos, and carnage a tear in the Veil might cause, her ribald retort earns her a few positive reactions, and one gasping woman pleased to be scandalised asks, is this boy really saying what she thinks he’s saying? Then there is laughing, and then there is bawdy discourse begun upon as they try to figure out among them if a demon really ever would steal something and try to make a profit like a clever, entrepreneurial thief. 

Their captain, he says to her, “Perhaps you might ask that drunk over there about it. He might have something tell you, if you can reach him through his — ah, haze, of inebriation. Maybe he can help you if you’re looking for a bit of adventure.”

He points. And then, directing singular attention to Althea again, he winks, before turning to join in on the conversation at his table. Abelas is stiff besides her and glaring at the man pointed out to them. Looking down to her, the elf nods, following after her first step towards their new target. He ends up overtaking her quickly through both intention and the fact of his longer, stronger legs. Though he does not move too far ahead of her, leaving the wake he cuts a safe place for her to move through unharassed and unharried.

At the drunk man’s otherwise vacant table, the stranger is the first one to talk. “Look at that. A knife-ear who hasn’t disappeared.”

“Such an interesting sight someone might believe that’s why you’ve been watching us all night.”

In the silence, the two men communicate with each other. 

After taking a drink, the drunk asks, “What do you want from me?”

“Information.”

“And ya think I actually have some?”

“What is your price,” Althea begins, taking a step forward as she cuts in, her shoulder brushing past Abelas’ upperam. He looks at her briefly, as she continues, “Another round?”

“You really think I know something, don’t you,” he asks between two irritatingly drawn-out drawls of laughter. “All right. Prove it, then. That you really want it. Heh. Beat me in a friendly little drinking contest, courtesy of yooo-u.”

Whatever the point of this game could be — and it is a game, she’s sure, some kind of test the outcome of which matters to her for the bearing it has on the response he may give them at the end of it — it doesn’t seem worth the attention it will bring them. With pricks of tips of ice bothering the more intimate layers of her skin, she imagines the black anonymous heads turning their drunken gazes in the direction of an elf and a human engaged in a less than friendly contest with something important to them at stake. Some people might not look away after that initial curious glance. Easily some might be drawn into this, on the side of the human, to cheer for their own kind against the sort they never liked in the first place, who they now know they can’t be trusted, after all, isn’t it true that all elves now are part of a problem that constitutes a threat to our very world? It is not impossible that someone would lash out under the gravity of this. 

So it has to be her. She has to be the one who accepts, however slim her chances, no matter what sense Abelas may counter with. She begins, “I — ”

And quickly she is interrupted as Abelas passes her once again. Without placing a hand on her or gesturing for her to move aside, he steps in front of her, then beyond her, and he slams down his open palm on the table without making a sound. This silent violence gets the attention of the drunk. His eyes widen, his chin contracts, he looks for a second as though he might have been surprised sober before the drunken glaze returns to his eyes. 

“We all know that’s not a good idea for any of our aims. So just tell us, what do we need to know about the rift?”

Althea is trapped in a thin shell of encroaching, brittle tightness, easy enough to shatter, if only she could move. Her arms are trapped at her side however, as useful to her as a penitent Chant verse. She watches the two men as they stare each other down; one seated, one standing, one who will be considered the winner of this wordless exchange. 

In the end the human relents and takes a drink of what is before him, and Althea understands it’s not anything that’s actually alcoholic. He is an agent of the Divine. His acting skills include the remarkable self-mastery of complete control of his eyes. Even now they are still dull, shallow, uninterested, unfocussed, showing signs of everything drink can do to a person drowning in it. The human nods, once, and Abelas sits down across from him after pulling out the stool with an effortless flick of magic. She follows suit but her place to sit is made for herself with the manual labour of moving her seat with her own hands. 

“There’s not much you need to know,” the human begins after his pause. His eyes are still set upon Abelas, she sees as she peers at the two of them.“It’s a rift. Demons sometimes come out of it.”   


For all that she’s not feeling included as a part of this conversations, she tries, “There hasn’t been a new rift anywhere in some time.”

“Is that so? Not something I would know much about, don’t ya think?” Without looking at her, he addresses her with this dismissal. He takes another drink. Belches.

“Where is it?”

“You’ll find it outside the city. Out by where the alienage used to be, but farther east.”

Like a sting, the thought does occur to her. That elves might have been blamed for this too.

“Out by one of the old mills. Word is, the owner was a sinner, and this is his punishment. Destroying his business and putting all of his honest workers out of a job.”

Verging on politics, and what might be personal feelings, the agent of Divine Victoria resorts to the deflecting defense of drink once more. When he’s done he sighs and waves his hand as if trying to dispel suddenly disturbed dust. “And that’s it. Anything else you want to know, you two misfits can go and find out for yourselves.”

Without any need for compunction, Abelas gets up and that’s it. He walks away — after Althea realises that’s what he’s going to do and gets up to do the same too. She’s tired, she’s exhausted, she nearly trips, she shakes her head to get rid of such weakness. Not until it leaves her insensate will she have to indulge the desires it has for her. Unless she decides that she might be able to make some use of such a thing.

“And now it’s time to rest,” Abelas says. “We’ll go out in the morning.”

She looks around, and she sees that Morrigan is no where to be seen among the warm, buzzing crowd. Even she has retired for the night. 

 

**.**

 

Hours later Althea is at the end of a road she does remember. The rift will come next, later — when she has finished visiting what remains of Ostwick’s Circle of Magi. She intends to visit the new wound upon reality on her own this night, but there is something that should come first, she thinks, without admitting that this, what she’s just now doing, is something that’s just in case she doesn’t get another chance. It’s possible something might happen to her at a time not so very far into the future. 

For now, she takes a right at the end where an impervious gate used to be. She walks along what random sections of the once stout stone wall remains, keeping it to her left as she walks closer and closer towards the cliffs. When she makes it out of the scrubby, wind-gnarled woods of thin trees the vista opens up to her: a moon-bathed ocean lustrous with silver and white and dark-blue scales set upon its rough black skin, wind from somewhere washing over her and blowing back the protection of her hood. Off comes her hat and she tucks it into her bag to keep it on her person, and the wind is free to get into her hair and chill her scalp and spread like a compelling emotion.

With a tremor in her reluctant limb she makes it to where she intended to go, a place that was once known as a weakness in this wreck of a wall, hidden from most angles it might be seen by someone looking out from one of the towers. Over a pile of rubble, down into a knee-high depresion that was once a flowerbed, a step on flagstones that were a garden path adorned with some plants that were ornamental and not just functional alchemical herbs. Here she crouches and waits, watching intently the looming shadows of two towers that still stand at the centre of the once imperial fortress. 

And, after mindless waves have collided with the cliffs and insidious wind has roiled over her for some minutes, she sees what she anticipated. A quick glint of a held-aloft torch signals that there are city guard, or at least some kind of guards, patrolling this ruin. Probably they are not meant to keep out her kind specifically — more likely thieves, or foolish children on puerile dares to search for ghosts. But she will not risk it, in the end. This is close enough for her purpose. 

She just wants to be here for a bit, in a place where she can’t help but feel like she should have done something when she had the chance to a make a difference with so much easy power to call upon and make her will into a real bit of reality. She hadn’t even thought to put up a plaque. She hadn’t done anything to remember those who hadn’t been luckily enough to accompany her, to be with her on the delegation sent with hopes to go south so that, maybe, one of their voices might be heard amongst the cacophony. 

Here she is. Back, after so much has happened, some of which she could call good, done with her own hand, when it wasn’t too late for her to actually make a meaningful gesture. The only thing left she can give them is her limited time, which she offers now, on her haunches, sitting here, until it might feel to her like she has offered a portion of what she owes. Thoughts and memories begin to swirl like motes, though she wishes to keep them suspended and undisturbed. She wishes them to be as sparse snowflakes, left floating in cold quiet air after the blizzard has departed. Forgotten.

Behind her shadows shift. Something, still in darkness, moves towards her. She should not be surprised, but she can’t help but turn towards what’s moving closer to be by her side. 

Coming into moonlight that reveals him, Abelas looks to her for an answer. He remains silent in his questioning. He is grey, pale, like a morning before the sun.

“This isn’t somewhere I could have come during the day,” she says, and it’s true. They would have quickly been spotted and turned away upon approach. “But I had the chance, so I had to see it.”

He comes to her side as he had been meaning to. There he sits on his haunches too and begins to examine what remains of the structure that once was her Circle. He understands, she thinks, that this is a place that was, in her life, a place like his temple. Where, once she left, the rest of the world would always be compared to. 

“ _Ma ane vhenas_ ,” he says to her. 

Or, that’s what she thinks he’s doing just now. Speaking to her. Trying to. What she can manage in response is a dry, curdling word quickly losing the good will she has tried to infuse it with. “What?”

“I said, ‘You are home.” From him come the sounds of shifting. It is not often she hears any of his movements.

“No. That...word. ‘ _Vhenas_.’ What…” Are you doing, she wants to ask, but can’t quite do. She cannot imagine he is trying to upset her, even as she tries to hide her face from him, angling her head so that her reaction is just another thing shaded by the ubiquitous night.

“It means home. Where you live? Or lived. See, I am not a good teacher. You should have asked someone with a better understanding of your perception of time.” 

“No, no, no — you’re fine, Abelas. Really. I just misunderstood you. I was thinking _arla_ was the only word for that.”

Although the breath that comes after this is not as deep as she would like, she is able to take one again, finally, after realising she has been holding it for some time now. And, for the length of this drawn breath, she remembers how she used to be able, and wanting, to breathe stronger, and deeper. There is a pain in her shoulder, a blackness in her chest, but it is not consuming her. It just hurts. 

“Does this place not mean something to you?”

“I was not happy here.”

He is looking at her. She sees this, as she turns to face him, and the light of manifold stars shining upon him shows just what he thinks of what she has said. That he has always found happiness a frivolity, something not for him, something which he gladly gave up in pursuit of meaningful service and duty. Were any of them ever happy, were any of them ever anything without their gods, she wonders, and doesn’t dare to ask of him. “But I think I get what you mean. It will always be a part of me. It’s where I was meant to stay, too, before everything changed.”

Before the world had changed, she had meant to say. With a tightness forming around her eyes, she looks down, towards her bent knees, and tries to figure out what reasons she might have for misspeaking so. Anything beyond the obvious one will do. 

“You were not meant to stay here.”

“Meant to?” she repeats, looking up now. Her head cants to the left, her hair in its heavy bun sags to this side. 

“It was not your fate,” he explains. And, from the direct, calm look he gives her, she can read that he means only what he’s saying. There are no implications or allusions or further meanings she’s supposed to infer from such a comment.

“I don’t actually believe in fate, you know. I don’t think there’s a such thing as destiny.”

“Then what do you think is responsible for what has happened to you?”

Does he, she thinks, mean to ask her, how else can she explain all the coincidences and chances that have led her here, back here, to this place where she is crouched down in the dark, sitting next to another elvhen man, where she is searching for something she doesn’t want to call absolution? Perhaps he thinks that she thinks any of this means anything. That she must think something of the fact that her lost limb was marked by a magic belonging to a man who would become her errant lover, that she cannot have lived through this experience without coming to think it means something. Or anything.

But that’s not what the reality is, or was, or ever has been, with her. It’s just this: once, a handful of years ago, she was in a place at a time when something was happening. You might say she was brought there by her curiosity and an inclination towards kindness, but that’s about it. She wouldn’t have even been there if the rest of the mages she had lived with across the turbulent seas had decided they were all right with their sedate lot in life. Or someone else could have stepped in in place of her. Who wouldn’t be drawn to an imperiled old woman’s cries for help, or the sight of a Divine sacrificed by a malformed being who repeatedly refused to be kept down by history?

Abelas, for whatever reasons he may have, does not agree with her. She can tell that from the firm set of his brow. After all, hadn’t he said once, when he was speaking of his own possible end, that he would make it to the gentle end of uthenera, if fate were kind? That had been back in the temple of Mythal. Before he turned and walked away and did not witness shemlens taking for themselves the power of the Well he and his Sentinels had so dearly guarded. 

“The people I knew, who were here. Who died. They didn’t have to. They could have lived even if the rebellion never happened.”

“So, you think their deaths were meaningless?”

“No. Just pointless.”

“You lost people you cared about for no reason,” he says.

She nods. She says, “Yes.” Because Lydia didn’t need to die — Lydia didn’t have to be killed, murdered, by her students who had once been Althea’s fellows, and classmates, and people she had accepted she would spend all that remained of her life with. Perhaps they had been jealous of her in the past, and the attention and affection she was shown by the older woman who had come to fill the role of a surrogate mother for a girl who had been turned over to the Circle by a willing, pious family before she could say she had celebrated six whole name days. But even if their relationship had been poisoned by jealousy and envy and such negative things, it was this betrayal that completely ruined it between her and them. Hunched up on her trembling legs, hiding in the shadows of the ruined and abandoned Circle, she still feels she does not have forgiveness to offer if it were asked of her. As Lydia did not deserve death, they do not deserve pardon.

Turning to the ancient elf again, Althea asks him, “Do you know where she is?”

“Who?”

“Mythal.”

“No, I do not.”

“Then no-one knows where she is.”

“Nothing has changed for a long time,” he says, and he does not seem to be comforted, or discomforted. He just is. 

“Is this her fate, then? To just vanish after everything that she has done?”

He does not answer her. 

What he does do, is stand up, reach his hand down for her to take. And she takes him up on his offer, Althea doesn’t counter against it. She clasps his hand and he pulls her up and onto her unsteady feet. He says, “It’s late. We should go.”

And they should. She knows that. So, taking a step forward, she stretches out her legs and begins making her way back to the city she doesn’t know like she knows these grounds, cannot know like the confined, stagnant place in which she had been immured for what was intended to be the rest of a lifetime no matter how long it might have lasted. She chooses not to look back. 

When they are over the wall, leaving the cliffs, and descending the sea-side hill, he says to her, “Mythal did believe in fate. When she rendered her judgment on what was just, she tried to never defer it. She tried to give people a choice to embrace it themselves.”

She puts her hat back on. Pulls it into place and pins it. Hides it under a drawn up hood. 

“And for herself?”

“She would know what to do.”

“Murder seems like something you can’t do much about.”

“She knew that betrayal was coming.”

That is the last thing that he has to say to her, before he sees her staying behind a door she closes.

 

**.**

 

But that is not where she has planned to stay. The second place she intends to visit this night is the rift. She makes her way there after a suitable amount of time has passed. Two hours later, when her eyes are watering and she’s sure he could not have made it to follow her again, she rises, gathers her staff, and goes. 

Getting to the rift will be a part of what she wants to do. Once there, she will lay down, and she will sleep, and she will dream, she will let him find her, and, if he comes, she will ask him for his help. This is her chance to do right by the people who call the place of her birth home.  
  



End file.
